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AN AMERICAN 
IN THE MAKING 



AN AMERICAN 
IN THE MAKING 

The Life Story of 
an Immigrant 
by M. E. RAVAGE ^ 




HARPER & BROTHERS PUBLISHERS 
NEW YORK AND LONDON 







0CT.-55 1917 



An American in the Making 



Copyright, 1917. by Harper & Brothers 

Printed in the United States of America 

Published October, 1917 

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©GI,A47C734 ^ x. 



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AFFECTIONATELY DEDICATED 
TO MY WOMEN-FOLKS 

Jeanne and Suzanne 



INTRODUCTION 

WHEN I hear all around me the foolish prattle 
about the new immigration — "the scum of 
Europe," as it is called — that is invading and making 
itself master of this country, I cannot help saying to 
myself that Americans have forgotten America. The 
native, I must conclude, has, by long familiarity with 
the rich blessings of his own land, grown forgetful of 
his high privileges and ceased to grasp the lofty mes- 
sage which America wafts across the seas to all the 
oppressed of mankind. What, I wonder, do they know 
of America, who know only America.'' 

The more I think upon the subject the more I become 
persuaded that the relation of the teacher and the 
taught as between those who were born and those who 
came here must be reversed. It is the free American 
who needs to be instructed by the benighted races in 
the uplifting word that America speaks to all the world. 
Only from the humble immigrant, it appears to me, can 
he learn just what America stands for in the family of 
nations. The alien must know this, for he alone seems 
ready to pay the heavy price for his share of America. 
He, unlike the older inhabitant, does not come into its 



INTRODUCTION 

inheritance by the accident of birth. Before he can 
become an American he must first be an immigrant. 
More than that, back of immigration Hes emigration. 
And to him alone is it given to know the bitter sacrifice 
and the deep upheaval of the soul that are implied in 
those two words. 

The average American, when he thinks of im- 
migrants at all, thinks, I am afraid, of something 
rather comical. He thinks of bundles — funny, pictu- 
resque bundles of every shape and size and color. The 
alien himself, in his incredible garb, as he walks off the 
gang-plank, appears like some sort of an odd, moving 
bundle. And always he carries more bundles. Later 
on, in his peculiar, transplanted life, he sells nondescript 
merchandise in fantastic vehicles, does violence to the 
American's language, and sits down on the curb to eat 
fragrant cheese and unimaginable sausages. He is, for 
certain, a character fit for a farce. 

So, I think, you see him, you fortunate ones who 
have never had to come to America. I am afraid that 
the pathos and the romance of the story are quite lost 
on you. Yet both are there as surely as the comedy. 
No doubt, when you go slumming, you reflect sympa- 
thetically on the drudgery and the misery of the immi- 
grant's life. But poverty and hard toil are not tragic 
things. They indeed are part of the comedy. Tragedy 
lies seldom on the surface. If you would get a glimpse 
of the pathos and the romance of readjustment you 
must try to put yourself in the alien's place. And that 



INTRODUCTION 

you may find hard to do. Well, try to think of leave- 
taking — of farewells to home and kindred, in all likeli- 
hood never to be seen again; of last looks lingering 
affectionately on things and places; of ties broken and 
grown stronger in the breaking. Try to think of the 
deep upheaval of the human soul, pulled up by the 
roots from its ancient, precious soil, cast abroad among 
you here, withering for a space, then slowly finding 
nourishment in the new soil, and once more thriving — 
not, indeed, as before — a novel, composite growth. If 
you can see this you may form some idea of the sadness 
and the glory of his adventure. 

Oh, if I could show you America as we of the 
oppressed peoples see it ! If I could bring home to you 
even the smallest fraction of this sacrifice and this 
upheaval, the dreaming and the strife, the agony and 
the heartache, the endless disappointments, the yearn- 
ing and the despair — all of which must be ours before 
we can make a home for our battered spirits in this 
land of yours. Perhaps, if we be young, we dream of 
riches and adventure, and if we be grown men we may 
merely seek a haven for our outraged human souls and 
a safe retreat for our hungry wives and children. Yet, 
however aggrieved we may feel toward our native home, 
we cannot but regard our leaving it as a violent severing 
of the ties of our life, and look beyond toward our 
new home as a sort of glorified exile. So, whether we 
be young or old, something of ourselves we always 
leave behind in our hapless, cherished birthplaces. And 



INTRODUCTION 

the heaviest share of our burden inevitably falls on the 
loved ones that remain when we are gone. We make 
no illusions for ourselves. Though we may expect 
wealth, we have no thought of returning. It is farewell 
forever. We are not setting out on a trip; we are 
emigrating. Yes, we are emigrating, and there is our 
experience, our ordeal, in a nutshell. It is the one-way 
passport for us every time. For we have glimpsed a 
vision of America, and we start out resolved that, 
whatever the cost, we shall make her our own. In our 
heavy-laden hearts we are already Americans. In our 
own dumb way we have grasped her message to us. 

Yes, we immigrants have a real claim on America. 
Every one of us who did not grow faint-hearted at the 
start of the battle and has stuck it out has earned a 
share in America by the ancient right of conquest. We 
have had to subdue this new home of ours to make it 
habitable, and in conquering it we have conquered 
ourselves. We are not what we were when you saw 
us landing from the Ellis Island ferry. Our own 
kinsfolk do not know us when they come over. We 
sometimes hardly know ourselves. 



PART I 
THE ALIEN AT HOME 



AN AMERICAN 
IN THE MAKING 



THE PROPHET FROM AMERICA 

EVEN an imaginative American, I suppose, must 
find it very hard to form anything like a just idea 
of the tremendous adventure involved in the act of 
immigration. The alien in our midst is too elusive an 
object for satisfactory study. He changes too rapidly. 
But yesterday he was a solid citizen in his particular 
village of Sicily or Rumania, of a piece with his ancestral 
background, surrounded by friends and kindred, 
apparently rooted in his native soil. To-day he is 
adrift in a foreign world, mute and helpless and tragi- 
cally ridiculous — a soul in purgatory, a human creature 
cut from its moorings, the most pitiable sight to be met 
on this earth. To-morrow. f^ Who knows? To- 
morrow very probably you will find him a prosperous 
citizen again, very earnestly devoting himself to some 
strange — until recently undreamed-of — business, giving 

3 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

orders or taking them, even now perhaps a bit dis- 
cordant against his new setting, and, except for one or 
two well-hidden scars, none the worse apparently for 
his translation. Who shall find the patience to follow 
him in his tortuous career? 

What is surely most amazing is that he should have 
started out at all. Considering the pangs of separation 
and the risks that warn and threaten him and beset 
his path, why, you might ask, should he want to 
emigrate.? Is it the dream of avarice.? Yes, in part. 
And the hope of freedom.? Without a doubt. But 
these are general motives and remote. The far-flung 
clarion call of American liberty and her promise of 
equal opportunity are the powerful lodestones that 
draw all immigrants alike. There are more particular 
motives than these to spur him on. Even freedom and 
economic independence have a varying meaning to 
individual aliens. Station in life, and nationality, and 
age, all play their part in composing his mental picture 
of America. And, as in war, so also in emigration, 
there are always immediate causes as well as remote and 
general ones. 

I have myself been asked hundreds of times why I 
have come to America, and I trust that there was no 
malice in the question. As a rule, I have pointed to the 
usual reasons. I explained that at home in Vaslui, and 
in Rumania generally, there was very little opportunity 
for a young man to make anything of himself. My 
parents had ambitions for me which their clinging, 

4 



THE PROPHET FROM AMERICA 

hopeless poverty made impossible of attainment. And 
I was only a child of sixteen, and I longed for the great 
world with its rich prizes and its still richer adventures. 
My soul was thrilled with the dream of conquest and 
the pious hope of delivering my family from want and 
oppression. But while all this is true, it was not the 
whole truth. In fact, I quite omitted from my account 
the most vital, because it was the most direct, cause of 
my migration. 

The remainder of the truth is that in the year of my 
departure from Vaslui America had become, as it were, 
the fashionable place to go to. Hitherto it had been 
but a name, and by no means a revered name. But 
suddenly America had flashed upon our consciousness 
and fanned our dormant souls to flames of consuming 
ambition. All my relatives and all our neighbors — in 
fact, everybody who was anybody — had either gone or 
was going to New York. I call it New York, but you 
as Americans ought to be informed that the correct 
spelling is Nev-York, as every refined person in Vaslui 
knows. 

I did not, then, as you see, come alone, to America. 
I came with the rest of the population of Vaslui. And 
Vaslui was merely a sort of scouting-party, to be 
followed directly by the main army. It has probably 
been forgotten in this country, if indeed it was generally 
noted at the time, that about the year 1900 there was 
what, to my eyes, appeared to be a national migration 
from Rumania to New York, a migration which seemed 

5 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

literally to include well-nigh the whole Rumanian 
race. 

What had so suddenly raised the prestige of New 
York among the Vasluianders and the Moldavian 
traveling public generally, I am in an excellent position 
to relate, for it so happened that the principal agent in 
this grand scheme of advertising among us the attrac- 
tions of New York was a not distant relative of my own. 
I am well aware that such services as his ought not to 
go unrewarded, and I know that already your curiosity 
about his identity is getting the better of you, but until 
a committee of representative New-Yorkers assures me 
of its appreciation of mine and my countrymen's 
patronage, I feel in honor bound to respect my kins- 
man's modesty and to guard his secret. Meantime you 
shall know him by the name of Couza. Couza is a 
royal Rumanian cognomen, and my relative, whether 
by divine gift or forethought, had an unmistakable 
royal air, at least while he was in Vaslui. 

Couza, then, put in an appearance in our town during 
the winter of 1899, after an absence in America of some 
fourteen years. For months before, if you had put 
your ear to the ground, you might have heard the 
distant rumble of his approach, and Vaslui held not 
only its ear to the ground, but its breath. It seemed to 
us that our life had been hitherto dull and common, 
but that at last it was to be tipped with glory and 
romance. Couza's brother Jacob became overnight the 
first citizen of the town, and this reflected glory was 

6 



THE PROPHET FROM AMERICA 

shared by all our family. Those daily letters that 
Jacob received were inquired after by the whole com- 
munity. They became, in the truest sense, Vaslui's 
first newspaper, for they contained the only intelligence 
we cared to hear about. Now he was embarking at 
Nev-York, and now he had landed at Havre. A long 
succession of bulletins reported him at the various 
capitals and great cities of Europe. He was coming, 
coming, coming. The air was growing too thick for 
respiration. On the street, in the market, at the 
synagogue, we kept asking one another the one ques- 
tion, "When will he arrive.'*'* 

At last the long-awaited telegram flashed over us, 
and I shall never forget my terrible disappointment on 
learning its message. For weeks I had been training 
in the boys' chorus which was to welcome the guest on 
his arrival. And now, at the last moment, he had cold- 
bloodedly decided to come in on the midnight train. 
The choral reception had, therefore, to be abandoned. 
Vaslui must content itself with a mere representative 
committee of citizens and restrain its pent-up enthusi- 
asm as best it might till the morrow. I have a very 
vivid recollection of that night of Couza's arrival, for, 
although I was deprived of a direct share in the recep- 
tion, I had a partial reward for my disappointment in 
the reflected splendor that fell upon me through my 
father. He, being one of the guest's family, was 
chosen a member of the welcoming committee; and 
toward two o'clock in the morning he burst into the 

2 7 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

house trailing clouds of glory from his rare experience. 
We had been tossing about for several intolerable 
hours, wondering whether he ever would get back. No 
sooner did we hear his key in the door than we leaped 
up in our beds and greeted him with a chorus of inquiry 
that nearly frightened him. 

"Is he here.f^" we yelled all together. 

"Is he.^ Well, I should rather say so!" father cried, 
breathlessly, and still in the dark. 

Then followed things amazing. For hours that 
seemed like brief moments we sat agape, listening to 
a detailed account of the arrival and a somewhat 
bewildering word-picture of the personage himself. 

"You should see the old boy," my parent began. 
"It seems only like yesterday when I used to see him 
in these very streets, a slouchy, unprepossessing 
youngster, with his toes out at his gaping boot-tips, 
carrying heavy cans of milk around for his mother. 
Remember, mamma, he used to bring us our liter every 
morning before we got our own cow.? And do you 
remember how your brother Samuel never tired of 
telling us what a dunce the urchin was at school? 
Ah, this Nev-York must be a wonderful place. Why, 
I did not know him at all when he stepped off the car, 
not until Jacob rushed up to him and was followed by 
the whole cheering lot of us. At first I thought he was 
a rov [rabbi]; he is so large, and stout, and dignified. 
He wore a long, black frock-coat and a high hat — just 
the kind that Reb Sander wears on Saturdays at the 

8 



THE PROPHET FROM AMERICA 

services. But when I got up nearer to him, I noticed 
that he was clean-shaven. Would you believe it? He 
did not even have a mustache. I never saw so many 
trunks and bags in all my life as they unloaded for him. 
And jewelry! He had diamonds in his cravat and 
brilliants on his fingers, and a magnificent gold chain 
from which hung a great locket stuck full of more 
diamonds. He is a millionaire, if ever there was one in 
America." 

This was very exciting and altogether astonishing in 
many ways. It suddenly revealed America to us in a 
new light; for you must not suppose that we were so 
ignorant as never to have heard of the place at all. 
The name Nev-York was, indeed, rather new, and we 
admired father a good deal for throwing it so glibly into 
his account. But then you could not expect us to 
know the whole map of America in detail. Of Amer- 
ica, however, we had heard considerable on several 
occasions. Wlienever a Vasluiander went into bank- 
ruptcy, and whenever a soldier wearied of the discipline 
and deserted, it was bruited abroad that he had "run 
away to America." There was a female beggar in the 
town whom mother always singled out for special 
kindnesses. I used to wonder about her, until one day 
I learned that she had once been the well-to-do mistress 
of a home of her own, but that her husband had tired 
of her and escaped to America. I had thus come to 
think of the place as a city of refuge, an exile which men 
fled to only in preference to going to prison. 

9 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

I had heard of people going to Vienna and Germany 
and Paris, and even to England for business or pleasure, 
but no one, to my knowledge, had ever gone to America 
of his own free will. And of those who went, consider- 
ing the circumstances of their departure, none ever 
returned to tell us what it was like, any more than if 
they had gone to the other world. In fact, a person 
gone to America was exactly like a person dead. That 
was why, on those rare occasions when a family followed 
its breadwinner to that distant land, the whole com- 
munity turned out, and marched in slow time to the 
station, and wept loudly and copiously, and remembered 
the unfortunates in its prayer on the next Saturday. 

I said that no one had ever returned from America. 
But there was one exception; and I mention it here 
because the individual was destined to become the 
villain in the piece which I am here transcribing. It 
was commonly gossiped in Vaslui that Itza Baer, who 
was hand-in-glove with officialdom, and whom every 
one feared and flattered as a notorious informer, had 
years before returned from America, where he must 
have had a stormy and ignominious career, because 
whenever anybody ventured to ask him about it, he 
would merely say that he preferred to serve his term 
than to live a dog's life in exile, and forthwith change 
the subject. 

This Itza Baer was at first decidedly friendly to the 
news of Couza's coming. When the time arrived he 
even went so far as to consent to serve on the committee, 

10 



THE PROPHET FROM AMERICA 

and at the station he was, according to father's report, 
one of the first to greet the arrival. Father went into 
circumstantial detail in his account of this historic 
greeting. He said that the rest of the committee drew 
back a step and stood around in solemn awe while the 
two Americans exchanged compliments in English. 
But the odd thing was that Itza Baer ever after had an 
ironical smile about his lips and an impish twinkle in 
his eye when referring to that English conversation. 
He was never seen speaking to Couza again, except at 
the temple on the Saturday following the event, and 
then it was neither in English nor in friendship. A 
mysterious coldness seemed to have developed between 
the two men almost from the start; and when Vaslui 
fell down on its knees and worshiped Couza as the 
great man he was, Itza Baer's jealousy — for jealousy 
was all it could be — turned into whispered threats at 
first, and finally into open hostility. 

On the morrow after the arrival I saw him. I saw 
him on the first of those impressive progresses which 
were to become a regular, but not a conimon, sight in 
the daily life of our town for the next fortnight. He was 
riding slowly in a droshka, smiling happily, and bowing 
unpretentiously to the populace. The streets were 
lined with craning, round-eyed, tiptoeing Vasluianders, 
open-mouthed peasants, and gay-attired holiday visitors 
from neighboring towns who, having heard of the glory 
that had come to Vaslui, had driven in in their ox-carts 
and dog-carts to partake of it. I have sometimes seen 

11 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

the king ride in state through these same streets, and 
have heard the throng shouting, " Trdiascd Regele!^' 
But this occasion was not boisterous, but dignified and 
solemn. Vashii seemed too full for idle noisemaking. 
It seemed to feel that while the king was no doubt a 
fine fellow and all that, he had not come all the way 
from Nev-York, he had not brought with him any 
dozen trunks, he did not speak English, and wear 
diamonds, and dress in a different frock-coat every 
day. Quite the contrary: the king had on the same 
uniform every time he came to Vaslui. He was, after 
all, a sort of exaggerated army officer with an un- 
necessary amount of gold lace and other trappings about 
his person. He, like all military folk, might care for 
show and shouts. But an American millionaire was 
not a clown or a bear to be clapped at. 

Why, he was the most modest and the simplest of 
men. Any other man of his great wealth would have 
put on airs and gone to the Hotel Regal, the exclusive 
stopping-place in Vaslui for all mere aristocrats. In- 
stead, he went to his brother's home and unassumingly 
shared the humble quarters of his family. That 
appeared to be his way. Whatever was good for one 
man was good enough for every man. He never spoke 
of his wealth; indeed, he looked embarrassed and un- 
comfortable whenever the subject was alluded to. He 
positively disliked to talk about himself in any fashion. 

He let his actions speak for him and all that he 
represented, and from his actions Vaslui was forced to 

12 



THE PROPHET FROM AMERICA 

draw the right conclusion. The sheer extravagance of 
that trunkful of presents he had brought from America 
for the immediate members of his family spoke volumes 
for his generosity and the abundance of his means. 
There was the neat little razor in the leather case for 
his brother Jacob which a child could use without 
cutting himself and which was reputed to cost no less 
than ten francs. Then came the wonderful penholder 
for his sister-in-law, which, as Couza explained at some 
length, dispensed with ink-wells and drew its life-fluid 
from some mysterious source. The children, too, were 
by no means forgotten. There were railways that were 
wound up like clocks and ran around in their tracks 
like real trains, and dancing negroes, and squawking 
dolls, and jews'-harps, and scores of other delights for 
the palate as well as the fancy. And then the climax 
was capped when Couza himself drew forth out of that 
trunk of wonders the final package and proceeded to 
unwrap therefrom endless reams of tissue-paper, and 
just as his spectators were about to succumb to the 
torments of breathless curiosity, held it up and presented 
it to his old mother — a musical box to the value of 
twenty-five francs. 

Moreover, no one but a millionaire could have be- 
haved as he behaved in the synagogue on the memorable 
Saturday following his arrival. It was the usual 
custom for a distinguished guest to be honored with a 
reading of the Law, and it was expected from him, in 
turn, to make a suitable offering in return for the 

13 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

honor. But when the official reader paused for the 
donor to fill in the blank, Couza calmly and very 
distinctly said, "One hundred and twenty -five francs," 
and looked modestly about at the astounded faces of 
the congregation. That donation simply transcended 
our imagination. The high- water mark until that day 
and for years past had been recorded by Eliezer Kauf- 
man, the wealthy merchant, now dead, who had once 
in an extravagant moment subscribed five francs; and 
the old men in Vaslui still talked of it in awed tones. 
A hundred and twenty-five francs! Why, even when 
crops were bumpers a grain-merchant could garner no 
more than that in a month. The sum would bring a 
team of oxen, pay two years' rent for a house in town, 
or very nearly buy a modest dwelling in the country. 

From that day on Vaslui became a changed town. 
Hitherto we had been content to gaze in abstracted 
admiration at the splendid phenomenon and the dim, 
romantic land that lay behind him. But now the 
shimmering apparition had become a solid reality. We 
had seen with our own eyes, and had heard with our 
own ears, the concrete thing that it meant to be an 
American millionaire, and Vaslui suddenly felt a vast 
ambition stirring in its galloping heart. Gone was the 
languor, the easy-going indifference, the resignation, 
the despair that once dwelt in the lines of our faces. 
We became a bustling, seething, hopeful community. 
A star had risen in heaven to lead us out of the 
wilderness. 

14 



II 

THE GOSPEL OF NEW YORK 

THE very next day my father took me by the hand 
and marched me straight up to Great Headquar- 
ters. He had done some deep thinking all night and had 
apparently worked up an exceedingly clever scheme. At 
least I supposed it was clever until we reached our desti- 
nation. I had been given only the broadest outline of it, 
but I gathered from that that it was essentially a plan to 
induce Couza to take me to America with him when he 
returned, details to be worked out later. When, however, 
we got within a block of Cousin Jacob's store my heart 
sank and father turned very pale. Here was a line of 
similarly clever fathers with equally shamefaced sons 
and daughters, extending from Jacob's store in the 
front, all the way around the little circular park which 
was in the center of the shopping district; and another 
shorter column in the rear, starting from the back door 
and ending a block away at the gate of the court-house. 
The total effect was of two opposing armies struggling 
for the capture of Jacob's store and the great prize 
within. And every father and son there claimed 
relationship with Couza,^ and was ready, I suppose, to 

15 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

back it up with documentary evidence and a flourishing 
family tree. I had never reaHzed that all of Vaslui 
belonged to my family. 

It was just at this time that the notorious Itza Baer 
entered upon the scene in real earnest. To the shame 
of Vaslui be it confessed that he had succeeded in 
gathering about him a very considerable following, and, 
strangely enough, among men who had hitherto been 
held in high esteem for their integrity and shrewdness. 
It is at such stirring times as these that men go astray. 
When one or two of those whom Couza had felt obliged 
to discourage in their emigration plans chanced to 
speak of their disappointment, Itza Baer suggested that 
they might offer to share their first million with Couza 
in return for the passage across. He and his followers 
organized themselves into an anti-Couza committee, 
which made ridiculous claims of seeking to save Vaslui, 
and in the end they very nearly succeeded in ruining 
the hope of the town. 

From the day of the great incident at the synagogue 
rumors of an infinite variety had gained currency 
regarding certain phases in Couza's career in America. 
No one was able to trace them to their source, but they 
kept issuing with ever-increasing frequency and with 
the emphasis of unquestionable truth. We tried to 
discuss them with Couza himself, but he could not be 
induced either to confirm or to deny them. He would 
simply smile confusedly, and declare that everything 
was possible in New York. But at the end of that 

16 



THE GOSPEL OF NEW YORK 

week a report of the most stupendous sort reached our 
ears. It was to the effect that our guest was not merely 
a milHonaire, but that he held a very high government 
position in America, something resembling a prefect or 
a minister. This time we besieged him and insisted on 
knowing the truth. For this news was no matter of 
mere personal glory for an individual. It revealed one 
side of that wonderful America that we had not thought 
of before. One could get rich, once in a while, even in 
Rumania. But that our humble, downtrodden people 
could not only vote, but be voted for and hold office in 
New York, was a revelation of the most startling and 
inspiriting kind. 

This time, I say, we would not be put off with modest 
blushes. Couza, of course, tried to hedge about by 
admitting that people of our kind might become mem- 
bers of the Government, that religion in America was a 
private matter unconnected with politics, and that he 
had himself heard of an American President by the 
name of Abraham (he could not remember his other 
name). But while all this was gratifying to a degree, 
Vaslui demanded to know the whole truth. Was it 
true that he himself was the prefect of Nev-York? If 
it was, then nothing else mattered, because everything 
was as clear as day. Finally the conference ended in a 
compromise. Of the prefecture of New York he could 
by no means be persuaded to speak, but after long and 
cruel drilling and cross-examining he did confess that 
his visit to Vaslui was only a side-trip incidental to his 

17 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

commissions in Paris as a special representative of the 
American Government to the World's Exposition and 
the Proces Dreyfus. 

After that confession Couza's modesty dropped from 
him like a mask. Once his mouth had been forced open, 
he found great difficulty in closing it again until we 
knew as much about New York as he did, which is to 
say everything. He seemed eager now to make us 
realize how dull and circumscribed and enslaving was 
our existence in Rumania, and then point in contrast 
to the freedom and the v/ealth and the beauty of that 
City of God which was New York. There were many 
ways of getting rich in America, he told us. People 
got paid, it seemed, even for voting. A mere slip of a 
girl could earn fifty francs a week at making blouses. 
Girls, indeed, were not a burden there as they were in 
Vaslui. In America the richest young ladies earned 
their own living, fed and clothed themselves, and saved 
up the necessary dowry to get a husband with. In 
fact, girls were altogether an enviable asset to their 
parents. A man who had a half-dozen grown 
daughters, or even a skilful wife, could be independent 
and free for the rest of his natural life. 

One of the trunks that Couza had brought with him, 
we were to learn, was filled with American newspapers, 
and with their help he preached to us the gospel of 
New York. Seated on the divan in that vast room at 
the rear of his brother Jacob's store which constituted 
the family's apartment, he would spread before him 

18 



THE GOSPEL OF NEW YORK 

one of those extensive sheets and dehght his open- 
mouthed callers with a message from the great world he 
had come from. I do not know what other people got 
out of those readings, but I myseK was terribly excited 
by them, so that for months afterward I dreamed of 
nothing but ingenious murders and daring robberies 
committed in broad daylight by clean-shaven des- 
peradoes in frock-coats and silk hats. I conceived of 
New York as a brave, adventurous sort of place where 
life was a perilous business, but romantic for that very 
reason. 

Those American newspapers puzzled us considerably. 
We had expected that they would naturally be in 
English, but we discovered with surprise that for the 
most part they were printed in our own familiar 
Yiddish, although it was a Yiddish somewhat corrupted, 
like Couza's own speech, with a curious admixture of 
strange barbarisms. Couza laid great emphasis, as was 
most natural, on the unlimited opportunities for earning 
money in New York, and to that end he invited our 
attention to the pages upon pages of frantic appeals 
from America for every variety of help. It was vastly 
encouraging to hear him read those appeals and to 
know how badly we were wanted in America. But we 
were a little obtuse at times. We could not under- 
stand, for instance, why any one should want a dozen 
girls to keep on w^orking at blouses day after day without 
end. Wliat did a body want with so many waists, we 
asked our interpreter. But we got little satisfaction in 

19 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

this regard. He seemed to delight in filling his mouth 
with those strange long words that somehow got into 
every sentence and spoiled its meaning for us. And he 
showed, I thought, decided resentment at being inter- 
rupted with a request to explain. When his own 
brother Jacob asked to be told what was meant by a 
stenographer, Couza contented himself with pointing 
the moral as to the brutalizing effect of living in such 
a place as Vaslui, where grown men did not know the 
things that every child in New York knew. That was 
perhaps a bit hard on my poor cousin, but even he 
could not help agreeing with Couza and hoping all the 
more deeply, in consequence, that his children at least 
might some day get out into the civilized world. 

If any proof were needed of Couza's high character 
and noble interests, and if anything could effectively 
give the lie to the unwarranted, ill-tempered slurs of 
Itza Baer and his anti-Couza party, we got it in Couza's 
constant references to education. He pointed with 
profound scorn to the inferiority of the Rumanian 
schools, and denounced our Government bitterly for 
forcing us to pay an annual tuition rate of thirty francs 
for each pupil in the elementary schools. In New 
York, it appeared, education was to be got altogether 
without cost, by Jew and Gentile alike, by day or by 
night. The Government of America not only did not 
exact charges for instruction; it compelled parents to 
send their children to school, and it begged grown-ups 
to come and be educated when their day's work was 

20 



THE GOSPEL OF NEW YORK 

over. Couza cited instances of young men of his ac- 
quaintance who had become doctors and lawyers, and of 
young women who had become teachers by studying at 
night and earning their Hving in the daytime. He had 
himself obtained his remarkable education in that 
way. 

After these sessions my father would come away 
flushed with enthusiasm and repeat, excitedly, 
"America is good, America is good ! " He had long been 
cherishing the hope of making a doctor of me, but he 
had not even succeeded in getting me into the public 
school. Every fall he would take me around from 
No. 1 to No. 2, and always he would get the same 
answer: "No room." I knew of hundreds of other 
cases like my own. There was nothing for us to do but 
to go to the little private institutes and pay heavily 
for the scanty instruction we got. When we reached 
the high-school stage matters got even worse. Vaslui 
did have a gymnasium, but a poor fellow had not a 
chance in the world of getting in. The tuition was 
high, the school was overcrowded, and it was necessary 
to have a certificate of graduation from a public school 
to be admitted. The nearest university was at Bu- 
charest, and it would take a small fortune to go there 
and a very large one to make ends meet during the 
seven or eight years of instruction, supposing that one 
succeeded in getting in. Father had almost given up 
the idea in despair when America appeared in the nick 
of time to save the situation. 

21 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

Unhappily, these glorious chats about America were 
to be cut short with tragic swiftness. Some of our 
townsfolk were too insistent about their own selfish 
interests, and kept pestering him with their requests to 
be taken to America. One night, I recall, the widow 
Shaindel came with her eight children, and coaxed and 
begged and cried. She promised that she would slave 
for him, and clean his shoes, and scrub his mansion, and 
care for his horses, and weed his gardens, if only he 
would save her from the poverty and the tax-gatherer by 
taking her and her children away to Nev-York. When 
poor Couza could no longer endure the painful scene, he 
ended it by the sacrifice of his own dignity. *'My dear 
woman," he said, "do you take me for a millionaire?" 
Then he grew very confused and grunted something in 
his deep, bass voice. But I admired him for the 
splendid way in which he said it. It gave me a last 
glimpse of the fine modesty of the old Couza of the pre- 
donation period. Yet it was very clear that scenes of 
that sort were cruelly wearing to his sympathetic spirit, 
and that he was getting restless to leave. 

At the end of Couza's second week Itza Baer became 
shamelessly hostile. He declared that he could no 
longer stand by in silence while "this braggart" was 
bringing misery and discontent upon poor people just 
to feed his own vanity. And he let it be known that 
he intended to denounce Couza as an old fugitive from 
the recruiting oflficer. When Couza heard of this he 
declared, with a smile, that he would like to see any 

22 



THE GOSPEL OF NEW YORK 

little Rumanian king lay hands on an American citizen. 
To which Itza Baer retorted that he was ready to bet 
his beard and earlocks that the pretended American 
citizen did not even have his first papers. No one took 
him up on that because of the obvious technical points 
involved. But the next morning Vaslui awoke to learn 
with bitter disappointment that a telegram from Paris 
had recalled the special representative to his duties. 
He had left in such haste, the official statement added, 
that he had not even taken his trunks. The glory of 
our city was gone forever, for, although the hope was 
held out to us that he would return for another short 
stay and for his costly baggage as soon as Captain 
Dreyfus had had his trial, we never saw him again. He 
did not even come to get his niece whom he had 
promised to take with him to America, but contented 
himself with meeting her on the Hungarian border. 
The evident dislike he had taken to Vaslui hurt us 
sorely and puzzled us not a little, although we might 
have understood that a man of his caliber could not 
long put up with the annoyances he had been subject- 
ed to. Nothing but fear of the law prevented my 
infuriated fellow-townsmen from wreaking terrible ven- 
geance on the unspeakable Itza Baer, who had the 
cheek to go around boasting that we owed him a debt 
of gratitude for having saved us from a dangerous 
impostor. 

But if Itza Baer or any one else had imagined that 
Couza's mission would end with his departure, he was 

3 23 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

to learn differently. Indeed, it was only then that our 
great guest's preaching and example began to have their 
real effect. Now that he was gone, Vaslui could stand 
off and see the vision that had passed over it in true 
perspective. It became quite clear to us that, for one 
thing, Couza had done something with his fourteen 
years in America, something very enviable and mag- 
nificent. We realized, of course, that he was a fine and 
clever fellow, and that not every one could aspire to his 
attainments; but, we argued, if a man of genius could 
in so short a time become a millionaire and an ambassa- 
dor, then an average chap ought at least to have no 
diflBculty in becoming, say, a police commissioner, and 
in keeping his cellar perpetually well stocked with 
red wine. 

This much had, at any rate, become certain. There 
was a country somewhere beyond seas where a man was 
a man in spite of his religion and his origin. If Couza's 
career and transformation proved anything, they proved 
that in America a human being was given a chance to 
live his life without interference, to become rich and 
influential if he could, and to develop whatever talents 
were in him to the best advantage. Even if the 
informer were right, and Couza were a sham, America 
surely was no sham, and the message that Couza had 
conveyed to us was honest. Anyhow, no one from 
Rumania could go to America and do the things that 
Couza had done in Vaslui. No, it did no good for 
Itza Baer and his mournful followers to go around 

24 



THE GOSPEL OF NEW YORK 

howling that Couza was an impostor, that New York 
was not at all what he had cracked it up to be, and that 
we would find life so hard and so sordid there that we 
would walk back. We let them talk, and proceeded in 
feverish haste to put our enthusiasm into acts. 

Now I must confess that I have a very grave doubt 
as to whether it had been a part of Couza's original 
plan to effect anything like an exodus from his native 
land to that of his adoption. Those who censure and 
traduce him have said so; but then so have they said 
a lot of other slanderous, contradictory things about 
him. Perhaps I am wrong; but really I do question 
it. Surely it was not his fault that my fellow-townsmen 
were so literal and so simple. Let us remember that 
he was cautious to the point of taciturnity about his 
own achievements and accomplishments, particularly 
when he perceived the drift of the impression he was 
making. A less noble character than he could not have 
resisted the temptation of bragging about his own 
wealth and influence as he resisted it. 

And let us further remember that it was no voluntary 
misrepresentation on his part when in a moment of 
metaphorical excitement he let it be known that he was 
an envoy of the American Government in Paris; that 
the statement was forced upon him by my fellow- 
townsmen; and that in the deepest spiritual sense it 
was not a misrepresentation at all. The truth is that 
he was but a member of the great American democracy 
on a lark. When I got to New York the next year I 

25 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

found him inhabiting the fraction of a flat on Attorney 
Street, the remainder of which constituted a thriving 
dressmaking estabhshment. Mrs. Couza was making 
the dresses, and paying the rent, and otherwise attend- 
ing to the material side of Hfe, while Couza himself was 
keeping more or less busy as a foreman in a bed-spring 
factory, and saving enough from his earnings to get 
another frock-coat very soon. 

In a merely literal sense, therefore, it may be said 
that he had, after all, not been an envoy. But he had 
been something nobler than that; he had caught a 
glorious vision of America where any man might be a 
millionaire, an ambassador, or a President — what did 
it amount to that he, as a matter of crude fact, was 
not.f^ — and he had traveled all the way to Vaslui to 
share his vision with us. 



Ill 

THE EXODUS 

WITHIN three months after Couza's departure 
the America-fever had spread to the confines of 
the kingdom. The contagion arose simultaneously in 
Vaslui and Berlad, and stalked with the pace of lightning, 
northward through Jassy to far Dorohoi on the Russian 
frontier, south and westward through the Danube 
cities of Galatz, Braila and Turnu-Severin to the very 
doors of the royal palace in Bucharest, until scarcely a 
hamlet was left untouched by its ravages. During the 
early spring Vaslui had the appearance of a town struck 
by war or revolution. By the merciful justice of 
Providence it befell that the rich and the grasping were 
among the earliest victims. Forest-owners and land 
magnates got rid of their holdings, students abandoned 
their books, reputable merchants took the habit of 
bankruptcy and made off with their creditors' funds to 
the nearest foreign port. Houses were sold at such 
sacrifice that the value of real estate dropped to one- 
fourth its customary level, and a time soon arrived when 
no one could be induced to buy a home or a farm at any 
price. Household furniture was consumed as fire- 

27 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

wood; personal property, including kitchen utensils, 
cradles, prayer-books, and even clothing, were given 
away in such quantities that shops and manufactories 
had to close their doors. Trade was completely at a 
standstill. The streets witnessed a continual procession 
of trays and carts bulging with comically shaped bales 
of feather-bedding, because rumor had it that the com- 
modity was unobtainable in America. The railway 
station had never been so crowded before. There were 
cheerful farewells, and those who stayed behind cried 
to those who departed, "I'll see you in Nev-York 
soon." And what took place in Vaslui was only typical 
of what had come to be the state of affairs everywhere 
in Rumania. 

I am certain that in any other country such a general 
exodus, bringing the serious consequences in its wake 
that this did, would have been stopped by the police. 
Was not the thing assuming the character of a national 
disaster.'' But the Government of Rumania was far 
from any thought of interference. It stood by idly 
while the caravans kept moving on, apparently only too 
happy to be rid of an element of its population for which 
it had always entertained a quite frank antipathy. In 
fact, it did the reverse of stopping it. Ordinarily the 
getting of a passport had been a matter of endless 
trouble and very considerable expense. But in this 
Messianic year 1900 the bars were unaccountably let 
down, and every person not of military age who made 
application for a passport was cheerfully sped on his 

28 



THE EXODUS 

way by the officials and granted the document with the 
minimum of cost and almost no trouble at all. 

As the movement advanced from one astonishing 
stage to another our information about America kept 
growing vaster and vaster, until the few seeds of 
knowledge that Couza had scattered among us seemed 
like a primer beside an encyclopaedia. This remarkable 
country, so newly discovered for us, was infinitely more 
wonderful than it had appeared from first reports, and 
infinitely more puzzling. To be sure, Couza had made 
some passing allusion to a President, but it had never 
dawned on us at the time that this official was the ruler 
of the land. Surely no government had ever been 
known to dispense with the guidance of hereditary 
kings. Countries, no matter whether they did call 
themselves republics, were, after all, not charity 
societies to be managed by mere presidents. No 
wonder it was said that the Government of America 
was powerless to prevent troublesome persons from 
carping and poking fun at it, that newspapers had free 
rein to plot its overthrow, and that the ruler's position 
was so insecure that he never knew just when his 
enemies might supplant him. The geography of the 
place was even more surprising, since by all accounts 
New York stood exactly beneath Vaslui, "on the under 
side of the earth," and that would seem to mean that 
the inhabitants walked head downward like flies on the 
ceiling. It was regrettable that we had learned this 
only after Couza had gone, or we might have asked him 

29 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

to explain how it was managed. We might also have 
been told in an authoritative way whether it was true 
that in New York the railways ran over the roofs of 
houses, that the dwellings were so large that one of 
them was sufficient to house an entire town in Rumania, 
that all the food was sold in sealed metal packages, that 
the water came up into people's homes without having 
to be carried, and that no one, not even a shoemaker, 
went to the temple on Saturdays without wearing a 
stovepipe hat. 

By the end of April the greater part of the town's 
men of means and distinction had rolled away in 
carriage and railway car and steamboat, and the great 
problem of emigration gradually loomed up in all its 
enormity. How were the rank and file of the com- 
munity — the small grain-merchants, the poor shop- 
keepers, the hundred varieties of go-between, all of 
whom lived on the peasant and depended on the brief 
harvest season for their whole year's income — how were 
they to make their way to New York? The most 
conservative estimate showed that two hundred francs 
would barely pay the passage of a single person; and 
families in Vaslui were of the traditional, respectable 
type, consisting usually of father and mother and an 
average of five descendants, not to mention such odd 
members, commonly appended to all households, as 
grandfathers, invalid aunts, orphaned second cousins, 
and the like. To fit out and transport such a party in 
its entirety would require a fortune as incalculable as 

30 



THE EXODUS 

everything else connected with America was. Now, 

who among this great middle class was in a position, at 

the tapering end of the year, to produce anything like 

such a fortune all at once? Supposing even that one 

was content to let a mere representative of the tribe 

go forth to blaze the trail, and that the remaining ones 

could summon up the patience to wait until he had 

wrung enough out of New York's fabulous millions to 

send for them, where was his equipment to come from? 

Now that the moneyed class had gone, it was not even 

possible to sell or pawn the family heirlooms. The rare 

few who still had a bit of ready cash clung to it with a 

tenacity amazing even for Vaslui. So my native town, 

harassed and floundering, scratched its head and 

pondered its tremendous problem until it solved it — or 

I should say, until it would have solved it if relatives in 

America had been what they ought to be. 

Who the clear-headed realist that hit upon so simple 

a way out of our difficulties was I cannot now recall, if 

indeed I ever knew. I rather incline to the theory that 

there was no such person — that, like all beneficial 

discoveries bringing relief to suffering mankind, the 

solution was arrived at by all of us at the same time, 

distilled, as it were, out of the charged air. At any 

rate, and however that may be, it seemed as if all at 

once every one in Vaslui suddenly remembered the 

obvious fact that Couza was not the only one of our 

fellow-countrymen to have gone to America. Why, 

there was hardly a family in town that had not a kins- 
si 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

man of one degree or another in that land of millionaires. 
It did not matter now what the disgraceful circumstance 
had been that had driven him there, and it was alto- 
gether beside the point that he had hitherto been an 
outcast from our respectable hearts and our respectable 
world. Our views had broadened; we had come to 
regard America in a more charitable light, of late. 
Thank Heaven for providing us with a refuge in our 
extremity! And so there followed an eager searching 
of our memories for exact names and more or less definite 
addresses, and an immediate despatching of lengthy, 
affectionate communications to beloved uncles and very 
dear cousins and most precious nephews, with introduc- 
tory "why haven't we been honored with news of your 
valued health all these years" and salutatory "times are 
hard here ; won't you send us a ticket and a few dollars 
for our Yankel or Moishe, who is now a fine big boy, 
and you ought to see him." Unhappily, the endeared 
ones who were addressed somewhere in America had 
either migrated somewhere else, or were dead or had 
become hardened by excessive wealth; for very few 
answers came back and those few of the most dis- 
couraging sort. Times were equally hard in America, 
they invariably said, the country had just been at war, 
work was scarce, and they would therefore advise us 
to remain where life was simpler, easier, and freer. No 
doubt, they expected us to believe all this. But we 
quite readily perceived their motive — they feared our 
competition; America was so good that they wanted 

32 



THE EXODUS 

her all to themselves. Ah, well, we had Couza's word 
and example for the truth about New York. Nothing 
that these selfish ingrates, whom prosperity had 
rendered unsympathetic to their own kin, might tell us 
could move us from our resolve. And then just as 
everything began to look once more as black as possible 
and the great problem bade fair to remain as unsolved 
as ever, help appeared from the least expected quarter. 
The youth — the fantastic, impractical youth — seeing 
the muddle their elders were in, took matters into their 
own hands, and one fine morning Rumania awoke to 
hear the startling news that the Walking Movement 
had begun. 



IV 

TO AMERICA ON FOOT 

IT must have been along toward the middle of May 
that the intelligence reached Vaslui of the strange 
new turn that the emigration craze had taken; and while 
I am about it I shall let no amount of civic pride prevent 
me from recording that it was out of the neighboring 
and rival town of Berlad that salvation came. It was 
to the effect that a band of young men had formed 
themselves into an organization for the purpose of 
walking to America. I remember how incredulous we 
were when we first heard of it. In the first place, we 
had learned entirely too much about America during 
and since Couza's visit to swallow any such absurd 
notion as that it could be reached by walking. And 
besides that, the report was brought to us by a woman 
whom Vaslui credited with neither too much truthful- 
ness nor complete sanity. The person was a neighbor 
of ours, whose husband had served a term at the prison 
of Dobrovetz, justly or unjustly, for arson, and she had 
built up a trade in convict's work in beads and leather. 
She used to travel about to all the fairs, and often 
returned with a great assortment of wild tales. We 

84 



TO AMERICA ON FOOT 

little dreamed that before many weeks we were to have 
a To-America-on-Foot Society in our own town. 

Yet that is precisely what happened. We had hardly 
had time to make up our minds as to whether there 
could be anything in the strange story from Berlad, 
when a number of the boys in our own set held a meeting 
and announced that they had formed a walking group 
right in Vaslui. I do not wish to be immodest, but 
historical truth demands I should confess that I had 
the glory of being present at that meeting and becoming 
one of the charter members of the organization. We 
assembled, about twenty-five of us in all, in Monish 
Bachman's grain-shed just outside the town gate. The 
place was well chosen, for that shed had already be- 
come sacred in our hearts by many tender associations. 
It had been the scene of a long series of theatrical 
performances in which the present organizers had been 
both actors and audience. And although we were now 
practical men and quite done with childish things, our 
instincts must have guided us in selecting this senti- 
mental spot for our adult activities. We ranged in age 
from fifteen to eighteen, with the exception of young 
Frankel, the druggist's son, who, having spent a year at 
the university of Bucharest, was looked up to as a man 
of the world, and was, therefore, asked to give us the 
benefit of his parliamentary training. 

The meeting was a thunderous one. As in all 
parliaments, the body, which had gathered as a very 
harmonious one, soon split up into a number of factions. 

35 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

There was the extreme left, which advocated secret 
procedure and the exclusion of parents from our 
councils. They were in favor of immediate action, a 
nocturnal departure with French leave, and not a word 
to our families until we had reached New York, when a 
telegram would suffice to inform them of what had 
happened. That plan had in its favor the element of 
romance. But it was forthwith howled down by the 
extreme right, the reactionaries, who laughed at the 
whole scheme and declared that if we could not travel 
like gentlemen we might as well abandon the idea of 
America entirely. Finally the moderates won out. 
Led by the chairman himself, they argued that it would 
be wiser to take the townspeople into our secret, and 
gain the benefit of their advice and support. 

Before adjourning, we took up, at Frankel's sugges- 
tion, the matter of permanent organization. We 
elected a president and invested him with tyrannical 
powers over our bodies and souls. He was to preside 
at the meetings while we remained in Vaslui, and to 
act as the captain of the band on the march. He could 
dismiss a member from the group for a capital offense, or 
punish him with reduced rations and solitary marching 
forty meters behind the column for minor misde- 
meanors. A number of us objected to making the 
captain into a king, pointing out the patent fact that 
he was called a president, and crying vehemently that 
this granting of wholesale privileges to a president was 
totally out of harmony with the spirit of the great 

36 



TO AMERICA ON FOOT 

country to which we were going. Next we turned to 
the choosing of a treasurer, and experienced tremendous 
diflaculties in deciding what one of us could most safely 
be intrusted with our prospective common funds. 
Then the temporary chairman suggested that we ought 
to have a secretary, "just for the dignity of the organiza- 
tion," even though we may find no duties for him. 
Last of all, I was myself picked for the post of commis- 
sary-general, with powers to purchase supplies and 
apportion the rations — always, of course, under orders 
from the president and captain. 

But, alas ! the irony of fate and the cruelty of parents ! 
No sooner had we each retired to our own homes, and 
no sooner did we break the news to our several fathers, 
than we found good reason to repent of our failure to 
adopt the program of the leftists. The ingrate Monish 
Bachman, unmindful of the glory that had fallen upon 
his grain-shed, promptly deposed the powerful tyrant, 
who was his own son Yankel. Neither he nor my 
parent would hear of the "absurd" idea. Monish, 
having once been wealthy, and being still very proud 
and something of a power in the community, could see 
no reason why his son should undergo the hardship 
and the indignity of having to tramp to America. "If 
Yankel must go away," he declared, with a flourish, 
"I am not yet so poor but that I could afford to have 
him travel as befits my position." But Yankel need 
not leave home at all, he insisted. The youngster was 
very useful to him in his business. In vain did the boy 

37 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

object that he cared nothing about dignity and position, 
that he thought the railway and steamboat were tire- 
some, uninteresting, grandfatherly modes of travel, 
unworthy of a boy. Monish had put his foot down. 

With me things went quite as badly, if not worse. 
My father was a cleverer man than Yankel's, and 
therefore he had no difficulty in trumping up a whole 
chain of causes why he could not let me go. Number 
one : had I forgotten that no more than a week before, 
while I was bathing the horse down at the swimming- 
hole, I had very narrowly escaped drowning, and a 
whipping afterward into the bargain .5^ With that 
exhibition of my incapacity still fresh in his memory, 
how could I expect him to trust me to take care of 
myself on such a journey and in a distant country .f* 
Number two: I was the youngest in the family, and 
probably for that reason mother's favorite child — 
he was not talking about himself now. Paul was in the 
army at Hushi, and Harry was in business at Con- 
stantza. Was I cruel enough to go away and leave 
mother to die of longing? Number three: The crops 
last fall had failed; times were woefully hard; there 
was not money enough in the house to fit me out for 
any kind of a journey, however inexpensive. 

All this array of logic I might have met, but before 
long father's arguments were reinforced by mother's 
pleadings. Had I forgotten Annie, my only sister, who 
had died but three years before, a flower struck down in 
the midst of spring.'^ How could I think of abandoning 

38 



TO AMERICA ON FOOT 

father and mother in their sorrow and quit the precious 
soil where Annie lay buried? Against the logic of 
bereavement, I saw, I had no hope of prevailing. Even 
though my reason did not yield, my heart did, and the 
session ended in tears. 

In the mean time Vaslui generally shov. ed a very 
different disposition toward the new emigration. In 
spite of its deposed president and commissary-general, 
the group had managed to grow both in numbers and 
in public approval. It had been joined by several 
older men, so that the roster contained, by now, some 
forty-odd names. The organization held daily meet- 
ings — no longer in the grain-shed, but in one of the 
town halls — the preparations for the journey were being 
rushed and enthusiasm ran very high, not only among 
the members themselves, but especially in the com- 
munity. If the earlier emigration had aroused interest, 
this new and strange development had in it the pictu- 
resqueness andthe heroic pathos which could not but 
appeal to the imagination and touch the heart. The 
majority of those who composed the reorganized group 
were preparing to walk to America out of real necessity, 
not for adventure. Vaslui gave them the homage and 
the sympathy that a nation gives its army marching 
off to war. 

The most striking evidence of the community's 
interest in the movement appeared right at the start. 
Before matters had proceeded very far a few prominent 
citizens of the town undertook to guide the destinies of 

4 39 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

the group in a more systematic fashion. They per- 
petuated the old committee which had been chosen to 
welcome the man Couza, whose missionary zeal had 
started the whole migration. The purposes of this 
higher organization were at first purely decorative. It 
made arrangements to give the group a suitable send- 
off on its departure, with flags and speeches and the 
like; and it instituted preparations for the welcoming 
of such groups from other towns as might happen to 
pass through Vaslui on their way to New York. But 
once the committee had been formed it found a multi- 
tude of unforeseen avenues for its activity. It was 
discovered, in the first place, that such funds as had 
been gathered from the contributions of the members 
themselves were absurdly inadequate to the needs of 
the journey. Furthermore, it was out of the question 
for the boys to camp out or stop at hotels in the towns 
where the night might overtake them. The most 
serious problem of all arose over the question of how the 
young people were to be cared for in the foreign coun- 
tries through which they must journey. 

Thus there came into being a whole succession of 
institutions which the original organizers of the walking 
movement had not even dreamed of. The home com- 
mittee of Vaslui was soon duplicated in every town 
where groups were forming, and before long these 
separate bodies became merged into a really formidable 
national committee, with branches in every corner of 
Rumania and activities that covered every possible 

40 



TO AMERICA ON FOOT 

need of the emigrants. And then the process of organ- 
ization was carried to the last chmactic step when the 
newly born national committee entered into corre- 
spondence and ultimately became affiliated with the 
great charitable alliances of Vienna, Berlin, Paris, and 
London. So that the marching group which had 
started out as an almost grotesque, childish fancy of 
merely local scope, had in a short time evolved into a 
world movement, with agencies in the principal capitals 
of Europe and even in New York itself. 

By far the most noteworthy by-product of this 
amazing movement was the advent of the newspaper. 
Hitherto Vaslui had been content to get its news second- 
hand. Journalism was a thing unknown, not only in 
Vaslui, but in all the other cities of Rumania except 
Bucharest. There may have been newspapers in Jassy, 
but I never heard of them. Even the Bucharest 
dailies were taken only by the coffee-houses of Vaslui, 
where they hung on racks clamped into their holders, 
and were glanced at sporadically by the merchants who 
congregated there. But all this was now changed. In 
the last month or two Vaslui and Rumania generally 
had passed through a cycle of changes the like of which 
had taken, elsewhere, centuries to effect. The mere 
thought of New York had somehow in a moment of 
time raised us to the level of Western civilization. 

I have often heard it said since, in school and college, 
that the genuine art and literature of a people are the 
direct result of its history and invariably reflect the 

41 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

popular soul. If this be true, I have myself been 
present at the birth of a little movement which may — 
who can tell? — prove a real contribution to the develop- 
ment of a genuine national art. For these daily and 
weekly papers that arose so suddenly among us were 
no mere purveyors of the world's daily scandal. They 
were essentially of the stuff of which literature is made, 
although I dare say they never found their way into 
books or libraries. They were filled with poems and 
passionate eloquence, words of cheer and hope, eulogies 
of the land of our aspirations, which for some reason or 
other was continually referred to as Jerusalem, en- 
couragement to those who were left behind, and praise 
to the Almighty for delivering his people from the 
bondage of the modern Egypt (Rumania). Nearly all 
the contents were the work of the members of the groups 
themselves. And for the first time in their lives our 
humble, simple people had found an interest in jour- 
nalistic endeavor. They eagerly devoured every issue 
from the first word to the last. 

The ancient arts of music and oratory likewise came 
in for their share. We had never dreamed of the pro- 
fusion of talent that lay fallow in our own midst. 
Moritz Cahana, the owner of the Hotel Regal, acquired 
a reputation overnight for impassioned public utterance 
which reached far out of Vaslui and extended even 
beyond the frontiers of Rumania. All the meetings of 
the group consisted in large part of songs, with Hebrew, 
Yiddish, and Rumanian words, whose airs were adapta- 

42 



TO AMERICA ON FOOT 

tions of ancient melodies — tender lullabies, melancholy 
yearnings for Zion, and solemn chants of the synagogue. 
Some had been borrowed from the doinas of the shep- 
herd, and others had filtered in, after many vicissitudes, 
from the cafes chantants of Vienna. The martial airs 
were quite recognizable plagiarisms from the milita- 
ry composers. But all of the compositions had been 
blazoned with the heroic spirit of the young men who 
sang them and the fervid enthusiasm of the times. 

In this immense burst of literary and artistic fire the 
practical side of the undertaking was, I am afraid, 
somewhat neglected. I attended the majority of the 
meetings, but I cannot recall ever having seen a map at 
any of them. In fact, I am pretty certain that not 
even the captain of the expedition had the faintest 
glimmer of a notion about routes. It was the broad, 
magnificent idea of the thing that occupied all minds. 
No one seemed to be in the least interested in mere 
details. As far as I can now determine, there was not 
a member in the whole group who could tell just which 
way he was headed, except that the initial stop was to 
be Berlad — some forty miles away — and the ultimate 
destination, New York. It was never made clear in 
the speeches or the newspapers how the Atlantic was to 
be inveigled into suffering the foot-voyagers to bridge 
its chasm. Only once had there been an allusion in 
biblical phrase to the cleaving of the sea and the rising 
of its waters like a wall, but as that came out in a poem 
it was not remarked. 

43 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

It was early in May that this first group, having 
completed its preparations, set out on its strange 
adventure. The day was a clear and balmy one. The 
marchers assembled at the gate of the little circular 
park in the center of the town, and from the earliest 
hour of the morning vast throngs of people came out to 
greet them. Promptly at ten o'clock the bugle sounded 
and the procession began. It was headed by Moritz 
Cahana, the orator of the occasion, and some other 
members of the committee in a droshka. Then 
followed the group in double file, clad in brown khaki, 
military leggings, and broad-brimmed canvas hats, each 
with an army knapsack on his back and a water-bottle 
slung jauntily over his shoulder. Last in order came 
well-nigh all that remained of the community of Vaslui. 
We marched and sang through the main thoroughfare, 
and then we swung off to a by-road that led to the 
southern gate of the town. There we halted, and 
Moritz Cahana made a speech that caused the whole 
throng to cheer and brought a lump into my throat and 
the tears into my eyes. Finally came the long last 
farewells, with tears and sobs from other people besides 
myself. The bugle sounded again, the captain gave 
the command, and the column was off on its way. 

I have sometimes debated with myself whether it was 
really the enthusiasm for America and the vague yet 
marvelous things she meant to me, or whether it could 
have been that fascinating uniform of my fortunate 
boy friends and the romantic glories that I saw lying so 

44 



TO AMERICA ON FOOT 

near before them that made my heart ache when I 
heard that bugle sound and beheld those feet lifted for 
the march. Whichever it was, the sight of that column 
on its way, the eloquent words of the speaker, and the 
dreary walk back home have remained among the 
saddest experiences of my boyhood. 



FAREWELL FOREVER 

I HAD given my word that I would not again ask to 
go with that group, and I had kept it, in spite of the 
fact that Monish Bachman had withdrawn his objec- 
tions and allowed my friend Yankel to go. But when, 
several days later, the papers began to publish exciting 
accounts of the progress of the group I quite frankly 
began to be sorry for having been so good. It made me 
desperate to think that here I was condemned to 
inactivity, my hopes and my ambitions turning sour 
within me, while the boys who had been my friends and 
companions were plucking rich adventure, seeing the 
world, and daily drawing nearer to that magic city of 
promise. New York. They had, according to a letter 
to me from Yankel, reached Berlad; the whole town had 
turned out to welcome them, had fought for the 
privilege of entertaining them at their homes, and had 
banqueted them for three days as if they had been 
princes. From Berlad they had gone on to Tecuci, 
where their reception had been even more lavish than 
in Berlad. Can you wonder, after this glowing report, 
that I was getting restless and repenting of my good 
behavior? 

46 



FAREWELL FOREVER 

Therefore, when, toward the middle of June, the 
second Vaslui group was organized, I returned to my 
attack on father. I threatened to run away and join 
the group at the next town. I reminded my parent of 
his ambitions for me, and asked him, after all the rebuffs 
his efforts had met, whether he could still hope to make 
anything of me in Vaslui. Just what did he expect to 
turn me into? I painted a gloomy picture of our life 
in Rumania — the poverty, the absence of every variety 
of opportunity, the discriminations of the Government 
against us. Whichever way one turned there were 
prohibitions and repressions. Supposing I wanted to 
study law, then "aliens" were not eligible to the bar. 
The ministry .^^ Rumania forbade the establishment of 
rabbinical seminaries. Well, I could go in for medicine, 
if only the Government allowed him to earn the means 
of seeing me through. But justice had taken precious 
care that he should not. When he had engaged in 
storekeeping in the country and had, by hard toil, 
succeeded in making a comfortable living, a new law 
had legislated him and all his kind back into the towns. 
Later on, when he had entered the family occupation of 
candle-manufacturing, an import tax on the raw 
materials and a heavy export tax on the finished product 
suddenly rendered the trade unprofitable. Wine and 
tobacco still brought tolerable incomes, but he was no 
more permitted to deal in these articles than I was to 
study and practise the profession of the law. He was 
thus doomed to stay forever in the petty business of 

47 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

grain brokerage, which, being the only occupation open 
to thousands of others, was in a state of such cutthroat 
competition that even the most competent were hardly 
able to support their families by it, let alone send their 
sons to the universities. 

Yes, it was about time that he should look the stern 
facts in the face and abandon his lifelong dream of a 
learned career for his youngest and most studious son. 
Why, as a matter of fact he had abandoned it. Hadn't 
I left school more than a year before and gone into 
trade? Well, what had I accomplished .^^ I had tried 
grain for six months and had made a total profit of 
eighteen francs for the entire period — just about enough 
to pay for my salt and water. I had been willing to 
compromise with our family traditions by condescend- 
ing to buy eggs and poultry from the peasants for 
export, but he had objected to that and had reminded 
me that I was not brother Paul, that it was enough to 
have one boy in a decent family fall below the level 
of his peers, and that he would rather have me idle the 
rest of my life than see me hobnob with market-women 
and butchers' journeymen. Even mother's self-humili- 
ation with her well-to-do brother Pincus, of Berlad, had 
availed her nothing, I was by no means certain that 
I would have greatly relished sweeping his dry -goods 
store and cleaning lamps and running errands for all 
his clerks by way of a stepping-stone toward some day 
becoming one of his clerks myself; but thanks to my 
newly acquired aunt Rebecca, I had been spared the 

48 



FAREWELL FOREVER 

pains and the shame of it, for she had threatened Uncle 
Pincus to run away back to her parents and never come 
back if he started in by filHng the place with his own 
relatives. 

My argument gathered momentum as it swept on. 
Knowing my audience as I did, I turned next with 
merciless emphasis to another subject. There was the 
dreadful horror of the recruiting officer constantly 
lurking in our path like a serpent, ready to spring on a 
young man just when he had reached the stage where he 
could be useful to himself and of help to his family. 
My brother Paul was a case in point. He had struggled 
for years — ever since he had been twelve — to learn a 
trade; had served a three-year apprenticeship for his 
mere bed and board; had then toiled like a slave first 
for fifty, then for a hundred francs a year. And when 
at last he had become master of his calling and was 
about to become independent, along came the scarlet 
monster and packed him ojff to its musty barracks, to 
be fed on black bread and cabbage, to learn senseless 
tricks with his feet and a gun, to spend days and whole 
weeks in prison cells, as if he were a criminal, to be 
slapped in the face like a bad boy, and to live in constant 
terror of war and the manoeuver for the rest of his life. 
*'If this is the sort of future you want for me," I con- 
cluded, dramatically, "you are right in trying to keep 
me here," 

It was cruel, this relentless logic of facts. Mother 
began to weep quietly, and father bit his lip and turned 

49 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

to look out of the window. But with the single-eyed 
selfishness of youth I looked only to the advancement 
of my own cause. I perceived that my speech had had 
its effect. So I followed up the argument with a 
brilliant sketch of the great things that were awaiting 
me in New York. Had they forgotten the wonderful 
man from New York who had recently visited us.^^ Had 
they forgotten his jewels, his clothes, his trunks, his 
fine, impressive appearance, his cultured manners, his 
official position? That was what America was making 
out of her men. For our visitor, by his own confession, 
was not the only one who had been so marvelously 
transformed in that great country. Everybody who 
went there became a millionaire overnight, and a doctor 
or a teacher into the bargain. There, in America, was 
my future as well as theirs. For it would take me only 
a few weeks to make enough money to send for the 
whole family. 

So at last I conquered. But my victory turned out 
to be only a partial one. In fact, by the time it was 
finally won the best part of the glory had been extracted 
from it. Although father and mother were both com- 
pletely won over, the chief difficulty still remained to 
be overcome. When father had previously told me 
that there was not money enough in the house to fit 
me out for the journey he had touched on a real obstacle, 
as I now learned. The costume alone would cost about 
fifteen francs, the passport about ten more, and I must 
have a few francs in cash. I suggested selling the cow, 

so 



FAREWELL FOREVER 

and father consented. But by the time that could 
be accomplished the second group had left Vaslui, and 
me at home, a thoroughly broken and disappointed 
boy. 

Meantime mother set about with a heavy heart to 
prepare for the great day which I looked forward to so 
impatiently and which she so horribly dreaded. For 
the next four weeks she knitted socks, and made me 
underwear of flannelette, and sewed buttons, and 
mended my shirts and my old overcoat, which last, 
however, I declined to take with me. She filled several 
jars with jam for me and one or two with some of her 
far-famed pickles. In the evening when we were alone 
together she would make me sit on her footstool, and 
while her deft fingers manipulated the knitting-needles 
she would gaze into my eyes as if she tried to absorb 
enough of me to last her for the coming months of 
absence. "You will write us, dear?" she kept asking 
continually. "You won't forget your old father and 
mother when the Lord blesses you with riches. You 
won't, will you.'^ Promise me again, my son. And 
if I should die when you are gone, you will remember 
me in your prayers, oh, my kadish, my male child." 
Once or twice she gave way to passionate sobs: "I have 
borne you, my boy, and brought you into the world in 
pain, and I have nurtured you, and prayed over your 
cradle in the night, oh, my joy and my solace." At 
such times I tried to comfort her by promises of daily 
letters, by calling her silly for imagining dreadful things, 

51 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

and by assuring her again and again that it was only a 
matter of a httle time before we should be once more 
united. 

Throughout those days of preparation father was 
silent with that pregnant silence which he always main- 
tained when his heart was breaking. Only on the day 
before my departure he betrayed himself. He had ap- 
parently been worrying all the time about that incident 
at the swimming-hole, when I had come dangerously 
near drowning, and he had resolved that he would im- 
press me with the seriousness of it so that I should 
never again imperil my life. On that memorable Satur- 
day night, therefore, after the beautiful home service 
with its candles and songs was over, he took me around 
to the house of the rabbi and made me take part in a 
scene which still lingers in my memory as one of the 
most solemn experiences of my life. Even at the time 
I remember comparing it with that impressive inci- 
dent in the Bible when Jacob calls his son Joseph to 
his death-bed. As we entered the rabbi arose and 
shook hands with me. Then, still holding my hand in 
one of his, he placed his other hand on my head and 
pronounced a blessing in Hebrew. When he had 
finished that he asked me to promise him by the love 
I bore my father and mother that I would never again 
bathe in open water. " That was an omen from above," 
he said. "The Lord of the universe has spared you. 
But you must not tempt Him again. Promise me that 
you will not. Be a good son of Israel." Then 

52 



FAREWELL FOREVER 

he bade me a cheerful good-by and a successful jour- 
ney. 

Wlien at last my preparations were completed the 
last and greatest obstacle to my migration had to be 
faced. By this time the second Vaslui group was ap- 
proaching the city of Galatz on the Danube, which is 
about two hundred miles from Vaslui. Father was 
using his influence as a member of the committee to 
get me admitted into the group at that point. But the 
leaders of the organization would not hear of it. To 
begin with, they argued, it was against the constitution 
and the by-laws, and, besides, it would set a bad prece- 
dent. Why should any one care to walk at all and 
endure all the hardships after this, if he could come in 
at the last moment and reap all the advantages.'^ They 
had wandered about over the whole country, had once 
or twice been attacked by brigands, and had exposed 
themselves to sickness and every variety of danger. 
And now, just as their difficult journey was drawing to 
an end, a member of the committee was trying to foist 
a raw recruit upon them. But father was determined, 
and after endless dickerings and pleadings and debat- 
ings he won his point. 

It had developed, you see, that the walking was not 
to be continued all the way to New York, after all. 
The home committee — the general staff, as it had come, 
appropriately enough, to be called — had apparently de- 
cided that at the outset. But the captains and the 
other leaders of the groups themselves had found the 

53 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

tramping too jolly — in spite of their occasional com- 
plaints to the contrary — and threatened to rebel. Not 
until they were convinced that without the support of 
the committee they could not march a step, would they 
listen to reason. So they agreed to walk only as far as 
Galatz, and there board a Danube River steamer for 
Vienna. Once out of Rumania, they would be out of 
the jurisdiction of the national committee and would be 
taken charge of by the Jiidische Allianz zu Wien. From 
Vienna they would journey by rail through Germany as 
far as Rotterdam, at the expense and under the guidance 
of the Verband der Deutschen Juden and the Alliance 
Israelite, and from Rotterdam they would sail for 
New York. That was the route that the group, and I 
along with them, actually followed. 

It was not until Sunday morning that I knew 
whether I was going or not. As soon as the good word 
reached me I proceeded to put the finishing touches to 
my packing and to attend to the inevitable farewells. 
All that day I went around shaking hands with what 
was left of the community — most of them people I 
had never spoken to before — and every one asked me to 
deliver his regards to some relative in New York, and 
to urge him to send a steamer ticket to this one or that 
one. During the early part of the evening mother and 
I walked up and down in the front yard, my hand in 
hers, talking of the past and the future, and carefully 
avoiding any reference to the present. Just before 
train-time she put the gold-clasped prayer-book into 

54 



FAREWELL FOREVER 

my grip which father had given her on their betrothal, 
and sewed two gold napoleons into the lining of my 
waistcoat. She seemed calm and resigned. But when 
the train drew into the station she lost control of her 
feelings. As she embraced me for the last time her 
sobs became violent and father had to separate us. 
There was a despair in her way of clinging to me which 
I could not then understand. I understand it now. I 
never saw her again. 

For several hours I sat stark and stiff on a wooden 
bench in my railway carriage, unaware of the other 
passengers, mechanically guarding with one hand the 
fortune in my waistcoat, as father had repeatedly 
urged me to do. I did not even try to collect my 
thoughts. I could only see a blurred vision of my 
mother going home from the station, and kept vaguely 
wondering whether America, with all her prizes, could 
be worth that. 

Toward morning my mind cleared and I could see 
things a little more in their true relations. As the 
train approached Galatz I looked out and beheld the 
wide expanse of the Danube with the rosy hues of dawn 
reflected on its placid surface. There were ships along 
the wharves, both on the Rumanian and on the Bul- 
garian side. My heart leaped up at the beautiful sight. 
I had never seen a real ship before. Here was the gate 
of the great world opening up before me, with its long 
open roads radiating in all directions. It was but an 

earnest of the nobler destiny ahead of me. In a very 
5 55 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

few days I should be out of Rumania. And then in 
two weeks more New York would no longer be a vision, 
but an inspiring reality. I could no longer doubt that 
my sacrifice was worth while. And I turned my face 
to the West. 



PART II 
THE ALIEN ABROAD 



VI 

FIRST IMPRESSIONS 

IT seems to be assumed by the self-complacent 
native that we immigrants are at once and over- 
whelmingly captivated by America and all things 
American. The mere sight of this new world, he 
fancies, should fill our hearts with the joy of dreams 
realized and leave us in a state of surfeited contentment, 
empty of all further desire. Why, he would ask, if 
the doubt were ever to occur to him — why should we 
not be happy .'^ Have we not left our own country 
because we were in one way or another discontented 
there? And if we have chosen America, it is quite 
clear that we must have been attracted by what she 
offered us in substitution. Besides, no man with eyes 
could fail to see right off the superiority of this great 
Republic to every other country on the face of the earth. 
Witness how the tide of immigration is forever flowing — 
and always in one direction. If the alien were dis- 
satisfied with America, would he not be taking the first 
steamer back instead of inviting his friends and family 
to follow him .5^ 

And yet, in spite of logic and appearances, the truth 

69 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

remains that the immigrant is almost invariably 
disappointed in America. At any rate, of this much 
I am certain: I myself was very bitterly disappointed 
in America. And, unless observation has been alto- 
gether astray with me, I think I am justified in the 
generalization that nearly all other new-comers are at 
least as disappointed as I was. It was not that this 
land of my aspirations had failed to come up to my 
dream of it, although in a measure it did falt^ short 
there. Neither was my disillusionment due to the 
dreariness, the sordidness, and the drudgery of immi- 
grant life, although this, too, may have entered into 
the equation. All these things came only later. I am 
writing of the first impact of America — or of that 
small fraction of it which was America to me — of the 
initial shock that came to me when I first set foot on 
American soil. And I say that long before I had had 
time to find out what my own fate would be in this new 
world, I experienced a revulsion of feeling of the most 
distressful sort. 

What were the reasons for it.'' Well, there were a 
variety of them: To begin with, the alien who comes here 
from Europe is not the raw material that Americans sup- 
pose him to be. He is not a blank sheet to be written on as 
you see fit. He has not sprung out of nowhere. Quite the 
contrary. He brings with him a deep-rooted tradition, 
a system of culture and tastes and habits — a point of 
view which is as ancient as his national experience and 
which has been engendered in him by his race and his 

60 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 

environment. And it is this thing — this entire Old World 
soul of his — that comes in conflict with America as soon as 
he has landed. Not, I beg you to observe, with America 
of the Americans; not,at any rate, immediately. Of that 
greater and remoter world in which the native resides we 
immigrants are for a long time hardly aware. What rare 
flashes of it do come within range of our blurred vision 
reveal a planet so alien and far removed from our experi- 
ence that they strike us as merely comical or fantastic — 
a set of phenomena so odd that we can only smile over 
them but never be greatly concerned with them. 

I needed sadly to readjust myself when I arrived 
in New York. But the incredible thing is that my 
problem was to fit myself in with the people of Vaslui 
and Rumania, my erstwhile fellow-townsmen and my 
fellow-countrymen. It was not America in the large 
sense, but the East Side Ghetto that upset all my 
calculations, reversed all my values, and set my head 
swimming. New York at first sight was, after all, not 
so very unlike many other large cities that I had traveled 
through. I viewed it from the upper deck as my 
steamer plowed into the harbor and up the river, and 
was not the least bewildered by the sight. I cannot 
remember whether I thought it was ugly or beautiful. 
What did it matter.'' From the pier I was hustled with 
hundreds of others of my kind into a smaller boat and 
taken to Ellis Island. There I was put through a lot 
of meaningless manoeuvers by uniformed, rough officials. 
I was jostled and dragged and shoved and shouted at. 

61 



AX AMERICAN IX THE MAKING 

I took it philosophically. I had been through the 
performance many times before — at the Hungarian 
border, at Vienna, in Germany, in Holland. It did 
not touch me, and I have forgotten all about it. 

But I have not forgotten and I never can forget that 
first pungent breath of the slums which were to become 
my home for the next five years. I landed early one 
Sunday morning in December, 1900; and no sooner 
did I touch firm ground than I dug into one of my 
bundles and produced the one precious thing that 
formed the link for me between my old home and my 
new. It was a crumpled bit of wrapping-paper which 
I had brought all the way from Vaslui and on which 
was scribbled in his ot^ti handwTiting Couza's address 
in New York. Do you remember Couza.' Ah, well, 
he was to be my first disappointment in a series of 
heartaches and disillusionments. With what hopeful 
enthusiasm I approached a policeman at the Battery 
and dumbly shoved my document into his face! And 
with what a sinking of the heart I peered through the 
frosty windows of that jangling, rickety horse-car as it 
bounced and wound through one shabby alley after 
another on its way to Attorney Street, where my 
millionaire kinsman held court I 

The mansion, when at last I reached it, presented an 
imposing enough front. And though the weather was 
ver^' sharp I passed up and down a long time before 
that marble portico with its brass railings and its taU 
cans of garbage and cinders lined up at the door, before 

62 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 

I could summon the courage to ring the bell and enter. 
The interior was even more impressive. I was mar- 
shaled through a large room in which there were a 
number of sewing-machines littered with quantities of 
textUe materials, and into the parior. There I found 
the table set for breakfast, and a magnificent display 
it was, with its German-silver coffee-urn and pressed- 
glass bowl, and silver-plated spoons and white Hnen. 
After a somewhat unceremonious introduction to ]\Irs. 
Couza — a lank, prematurely aged person — handshaking 
■^-ith Couza himself and my little girl cousin whom he 
had brought back with him from Vaslui, and after one or 
two perfunctory questions about my people and my jour- 
ney, I was in^^ted to partake of a cup of coffee with 
cake. I was amazed. Cake for breakfast I If I had been 
offered swan's eggs or steak or broiled pigeons, or almost 
any other thing, I should have kept my self-possession. 
But the very notion of ser%'ing cake for breakfast struck 
me as an extravagant fancy of which only million- 
aires were capable. 

And there was Couza himself, the magnificence of 
him as I had seen him in Vaslui apparently quite 
undimmed. And yet, with all the splendor of that 
scene before me, I could not help wondering, vaguely, 
as I thought of the revolting misery I had seen from 
the horse-car, whether there was not a worm somewhere 
at the heart of this brilliant appearance. In Vaslui, as 
you may remember, there had been many who doubted 
and openly slandered Couza as a sham, while the rest of 

63 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

tlie town worshiped him as a miUionaire and (by his own 
confession) an ambassador, and hailed him as a savior. 
Now, without anything in particular having happened, I 
found myself, with a kind of terror, sinking into agree- 
ment with those doubters and knockers. Yes, there was 
Couza in his customary frock-coat and his customary 
newspaper spread before him, but with some terrible new 
vision I seemed to see through all this. I knew that no 
one had been expecting me here, but I had an insane feel- 
ing that this whole decor had been set against my coming. 
And I ended up by wanting to cry out that I had been 
cheated, that Couza and the New York he had lured me 
to were miserable frauds, that I wanted to go back 
to Vaslui. 

My depression was increased after breakfast. I do 
not know just what I had been expecting that my 
kinsman would do for me, but I must have been enter- 
taining some vague hope that he would at once set me 
to making money in one of his factories, or, at least, 
that he would use his great influence with the American 
Government to find me a comfortable place worthy of 
my family and my genteel bringing up. I made some 
timid advances on that score, but Couza merely grunted 
in his familiar bass voice and declared that he would 
see. Mrs. Couza looked puzzled, and intimated that in 
America there were no such things as relatives; that 
money was a man's best friend, and that the wisest 
course to pursue was to depend on oneself. And then, 
without any kind of warning, my youthful cousin spoke 

64 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 

up and asked me to accompany her to her mother's 
home on Rivington Street, where I would take up my 
temporary lodgings until I found work. 

Of Couza I was to see a great deal more. He had 
evidently not been found out by the other Rumanians, 
for he had the air of keeping the entire colony he had, 
as it were, brought into being, under his spacious pro- 
tecting wing. On Sundays he paid us his weekly visit. 
Dressed in his frock-coat and chimney-pipe hat, he 
would walk from Attorney to Rivington Street and be 
greeted deferentially by all who passed him on the way. 
He always had matters of great moment to talk over 
with his sister-in-law, and some time during his stay 
the two would mysteriously disappear into one of the 
bedrooms, whence their earnest whispers would be 
heard by us outside. Mrs. Segal, my cousin and 
landlady, entertained a pathetic respect for Couza, 
whom she always addressed as "Brother-in-law" and 
never by his christian name. Before departing, Couza 
always distributed largess of the nickel denomination 
among the children, and a quantity of advice on how to 
become Americanized and successful among the elders. 
Once I had the distinction of sitting at the same table 
with him at one of those elaborate East Side wed- 
dings, where the hard-earned savings of years of 
toil of both bride and groom are lavishly wasted, and it 
made my eyes pop to see him hand the waiter a five- 
dollar bill in return for a toothpick! He was continu- 
ally bestowing praise on those young men and women 

65 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

who showed a tendency to become "Americanized." 
I tried for a long time to find out just what he meant 
by the word, and never succeeded — beyond the obvious 
definition of becoming Hke himself. But I know that 
he frowned upon me and a few others who betrayed an 
inclination to mingle with the radical and intellectual 
life of the quarter. That bent, he thought, was sure 
to ruin our chances for success in America, and make us 
personce non gratoe with the best people. 

That walk from Couza's residence, with my bundles, 
to Rivington Street was a nightmare. I know that the 
idea prevalent among Americans is that the alien 
imports his slums with him to the detriment of his 
adopted country, that the squalor and the misery and 
the filth of the foreign quarters in the large cities of the 
United States are characteristic of the native life of the 
peoples who live in those quarters. But that is an 
error and a slander. The slums are emphatically not 
of our making. So far is the immigrant from being 
accustomed to such living conditions that the first thing 
that repels him on his arrival in New York is the 
realization of the dreadful level of life to which his 
fellows have sunk. XnA when by sheer use he comes to 
accept these conditions himself, it is with something 
of a fatalistic resignation to the idea that such is 
America. 

I shall never forget how depressed my heart became 
as I trudged through those littered streets, with the 
rows of pushcarts lining the sidewalks and the centers 

66 



FIRST IMPRESSIONS 

of the thoroughfares, the ill-smelling merchandise, and 
the deafening noise. My pretty little cousin, elegant 
in her American tailored suit, was stepping along beside 
me, apparently oblivious to the horrible milieu that was 
sickening me well-nigh unto fainting. So this was 
America, I kept thinking. This was the boasted 
American freedom and opportunity — the freedom for 
respectable citizens to sell cabbages from hideous carts, 
the opportunity to live in those monstrous, dirty caves 
that shut out the sunshine. And when we got beyond 
Grand Street and entered the Rumanian section my 
cousin pointed out to me several of our former fellow- 
townspeople — men of worth and standing they had 
been in Vaslui — bargaining vociferously at one kind of 
stand or another, clad in an absurd medley of Rumanian 
sheep-pelts and American red sweaters. Here was 
Jonah Gershon, who had been the chairman of the 
hospital committee in Vaslui and a prominent grain- 
merchant. He was dispensing soda-water and selling 
lollypops on the corner of Essex Street. This was 
Shloma Lobel, a descendant of rabbis and himself a 
learned scholar. In America he had attained to a 
basket of shoe-strings and matches and candles. I 
myself recognized young Layvis, whose father kept the 
great drug-store in Vaslui, and who, after two years of 
training in medicine at the University of Bucharest, 
was enjoying the blessings of American liberty by 
selling newspapers on the streets. 

Here and there were women, too, once neighbors of 

67 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

ours, mothers of sons, and mistresses of respectable 
households. And what were they doing here in this 
diabolical country? Well, here was one selling pickles 
from a double row of buckets placed on a square cart, 
yelling herself hoarse to an insensible world in a jargon 
of Yiddish and "English," and warming her hands by 
snatches over an outlandish contraption filled with 
glowing coals. Farther on I came upon another, 
laboriously pushing a metal box on wheels and offering 
baked potatoes and hot knishes to the hungry, cold- 
bitten passers-by. And all the while there was the 
dainty little figure of Cousin Betty walking airily 
beside me, unaware of the huge tragedy of it all. She 
had herself arrived no more than a year before, but how 
callous America had already made her! I asked myself 
whether I, too, would harden and forget the better 
days I had known, and I fervently hoped not. 



VII 

THE immigrant's AMERICA 

AS I look back over my transition from the alien to 
the American state I cannot help wondering at the 
incredible changes of it. I see a curious row of figures, 
as in a haze, struggling to some uncertain goal, and 
with a shock it comes upon me that I am all this motley 
crew. There is the awkward, unkempt, timid youth 
of sixteen, with the inevitable bundles, dumbly inquir- 
ing his way from the Battery to the slums. A little 
farther on, shivering in the December drizzle with a 
tray in his gloveless hand, the vender of unsellable 
candies dreams of Christmas far away by his Rumanian 
fireside. A tap-boy in an East Side barroom follows 
next; his hair parted in the middle, his gift-breeches 
fitting a little snugly on his well-groomed young carcass, 
he hums to himself over his tub of glassware. Then 
the sewing-machine operative, now in his sweat-shop 
assiduously at work, now at his anarchist meetings 
scheming to reform the world. And then the student 
in school and college, with his new struggles and 
problems piled high over the old, old worries about 
bread and bed. And then — and then the picture gets 

69 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

too near for a good perspective, and anyhow the tale 
is all but told. The alien is become the self-made 
American. 

What a fortunate thing it was for me that I got to 
New York just before Christmas! Fortunate, that is, 
as immigrant's luck goes. If I had got here after 
Christmas I would, without a doubt, have starved as 
well as frozen. You know, of course, why I froze — 
because I did not obey my mother, which is simply 
saying that it served me right. Mother, it will be 
remembered, had insisted that I take with me the old 
overcoat which she had herself recreated out of a 
garment once worn by my well-to-do uncle Pincus; and 
I had refused because, to begin with, I already had too 
much to lug, and because I could see no sense in carrying 
old clothes to a country where I would at once become 
rich enough to buy new ones. That I did not starve, 
in spite of my landing with the proverbial fifteen cents 
in my pocket, was due not only to the fact that I 
tumbled right into the midst of the prosperity of the 
Christmas shopping season, but to a further piece of 
good fortune. 

What I would have done if little Cousin Betty had 
not had the foresight to bring over her folks, is more 
than I can tell. To be sure, the family had arrived 
only about three months before, but three months is a 
long time in the evolution of Americans. And so there 
they were, the whole seven of them — mother and son 

70 



THE IMMIGRANT'S AMERICA 

and five daughters — on the tunefully named Rivington 
Street, already keeping house and talking English, and 
the oldest young lady receiving callers, and Betty, her 
next of age, declaring that she would not go without 
pince-nez glasses when all the fashionables, including 
her own sister, possessed and wore them. Betty and 
her modish sister, being old enough to work, did 
consequently work at men's neckties, while the 
remaining four children went to school or kindergarten, 
or danced on the street to the music of the grind-organ, 
or stayed at home to be rocked in the cradle, according 
to their varying tastes and years. Yes, there they were, 
quite Americanized, happy in their five rooms, three of 
which faced on Allen Street and joined their window- 
sills right on to the beams of the Elevated trestle. They 
were still happy, because neckwear was a genteel trade 
that could be worked at in the home until any hour of 
the night with the whole family lending a hand, and 
because Cousin Jacob, the father and tyrant of the 
household, had been left in Rumania "to settle affairs," 
because the business of cooking with gas and turning 
a faucet when you wanted water was an exciting novelty 
and because keeping roomers was a romantic under- 
taking. They lived on the third floor, which was 
something to be proud of, since back home in Vaslui 
none but the rich could afford to live up-stairs; and of 
course "up-stairs" in Vaslui was only a beggarly 
second floor. 

I never contrived to find out just how many people 

6 71 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

did share those five rooms. During the day my relative 
kept up the interesting fiction of an apartment with 
specialized divisions. Here was the parlor with its 
sofa and mirror and American rocking-chairs; then 
came the dining-room with another sofa called a lounge, 
a round table, and innumerable chairs ; then the kitchen 
with its luxurious fittings in porcelain and metal; then 
the young ladies' room, in which there was a bureau 
covered with quantities of odoriferous bottles and 
powder-boxes and other mysteries; and, last of all, 
Mrs. Segal's and the children's room. I remember 
how overwhelmed I was with this impressive luxury 
when I arrived. But between nine and ten o'clock in 
the evening this imposing structure suddenly crumbled 
away in the most amazing fashion. The apartment 
suddenly became a camp. The sofas opened up and 
revealed their true character. The bureau lengthened 
out shamelessly, careless of its daylight pretensions. 
Even the wash-tubs, it turned out, were a miserable 
sham. The carved dining-room chairs arranged them- 
selves into two rows that faced each other like dancers 
in a cotillion. So that I began to ask myself whether 
there was, after all, anything in that whole surprising 
apartment but beds. 

The two young ladies' room was not, I learned, a 
young ladies' room at all; it was a female dormitory. 
The sofa in the parlor alone held four sleepers, of whom 
I was one. We were ranged broadside, with the 
rocking-chairs at the foot to insure the proper length. 

72 



THE IMMIGRANT'S AMERICA 

And the floor was by no means exempt. I counted no 
fewer than nine male inmates in that parlor alone one 
night. Mrs. Segal with one baby slept on the wash- 
tubs, while the rest of the youngsters held the kitchen 
floor. The pretended children's room was occupied 
by a man and his family of four, whom he had recently 
brought over, although he, with ambitions for a camp 
of his own, did not remain long. 

Getting in late after the others had retired was an 
enterprise requiring all a man's courage and circum- 
spection, for it involved the rousing of an alarmed, 
overworked, grumbling landlady to unbolt the door; 
the exchange in stage whispers of a complicated system 
of challenges and passwords through the keyhole; the 
squeezing through cracks in intermediate doors, which 
were rendered stationary by the presence of beds on 
both sides; much cautious high-stepping over a vast 
field of sprawling, unconscious bodies; and lastly, the 
gentle but firm compressing and condensing of one's 
relaxed bedmates in order to make room for oneself. 
It was on such occasions as these also that one first 
became aware of how heavy the air was with the reek 
of food and strong breath and fermenting perspiration, 
the windows being, of course, hermetically sealed with 
putty and a species of padding imported from home 
which was tacked around all real and imaginary 
cracks. 

In the morning one was awakened by the puffing of 
steam-engines and the clatter of wheels outside the 

73 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

windows, and then the turmoil of American existence 
began in real earnest. First, the furniture must be 
reconstructed and restored to its decorative character, 
and then the scattered disorder of feather-bedding must 
be cleared from the floors and whisked away into cup- 
boards and trunks. The men-folks had to fly into their 
clothes before the ladies emerged from their quarters, 
so that the latter might pass through the parlor on their 
way to the kitchen. In spite of all the precautions 
taken the night before, some one invariably missed one 
portion or another of his costume, which he promptly 
proceeded to search for with a great deal of wailing and 
complaining against his own fate in particular and the 
intolerable anarchy of Columbus's country in general. 
Then followed a furious scramble for the sink, because 
the towel had a way of getting unmanageably wet 
toward the end; and this made it necessary for Mrs. 
Segal, who slept in the kitchen, to be up before every 
one else. By the time the camp had once more become 
an elegant apartment, the coffee was already steaming 
on the round table in the dining-room, and the whole 
colony sat down to partake of it before scattering to its 
various labors, breakfast and laundry being, of course, 
included in the rent. 

The first two days Mrs. Segal would not hear of my 
going out to look for work. She insisted that I must 
rest up from the journey, look around a bit, and in 
general play the guest. "A guest is a guest even in 
America," she said. "And don't worry," she added; 

74 



THE IMMIGRANT'S AMERICA 

**you'll have time enough to make the money." After 
which she smiled in a pecuhar manner. So I stayed 
home alone with her, and feeling that I owed her some- 
thing in return for her hospitality, I tried to make my- 
self useful to her by helping with the housework. The 
army of roomers had no sooner dispersed than she 
packed the youngsters off and threw herself into the 
task with enthusiasm. "Housekeeping," said she, "is 
wonderfully easy in America." 

I had to agree that it was wonderful, but I myself at 
least could hardly say that I found it easy. It certainly 
was an extravagant way of doing things. The first 
thing we were going to do, she told me, was to scrub the 
kitchen. "Very well," I said. "Where do you keep the 
sand?" "Sand!" she exclaimed. "This is not Vaslui," 
and proceeded to take the neatly printed ^Tapper off a 
cake of soap which back home would have been thought 
too good to wash clothes with. For the floor she 
employed a pretty, white powder out of a metal can and 
a brush with which I had the night before cleaned my 
clothes. Moreover, she kept the light burning all the 
time we were in the kitchen, which was criminal waste- 
fulness even if the room was a bit dark. She herself 
would certainly not have done such a thing at home. 

About ten o'clock she started off to market. If she 
had not told me where she was going, and if it had not 
been a week-day, I would have believed she was on her 
way to temple. There she stood in her taffeta gown 
(it was the very one mother had once told me had come 

75 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

from her wedding) and all the jewelry I used to see on 
her at the services in Vaslui, and a pair of brand-new 
patent-leather pumps. As soon as she was out of the 
house I took the opportunity to blow out the gas in 
the kitchen, only, however, to be scolded for my pains 
when she re-entered and to be informed that greenhorns 
must keep their eyes open and their hands off. I could 
see nothing wrong in what I had done, but she kept 
saying over and over again that I had narrowly escaped 
death or blowing up the building. 

The things she brought back from market! Egg- 
plant in midwinter, and tomatoes, and a yellow fruit 
which had the shape of a cucumber and the taste of a 
muskmelon. I had never seen such huge eggplants in 
all my life. And here was another thing which was 
entirely strange, but which inquiry revealed was cauli- 
flower — an article father had once eaten at the home of 
my cousin, the doctor, in Bucharest and had never ceased 
talking about. Could there be anything in it, after all? 
I repeatedly asked myself during that day. Was I 
doing Couza an injustice? Oh, if the Lord would only 
grant that I should turn out to have been mistaken! 
Yes, but how about the boarders .f' If the Segals had 
actually made their million in these three months, why 
did they share their fine apartment with strangers .^^ 
Who but the very lowest of people kept roomers in 
Vaslui? I could not figure it out. America was surely 
a land of contradictions. 

Mrs. Segal and I had meat in the middle of the day, 

76 



THE IMMIGRANT'S AMERICA 

and then about six, when the two girls got home, there 
was meat again. I remember writing home about it 
the next day and telhng the folks that they might think 
I was exaggerating, but that it was literally true, all the 
same, that in New York every night was Friday night 
and every day was Saturday, as far as food went, any- 
way. Why, they even had twists instead of plain rye 
bread, to say nothing of rice-and-raisins (which is 
properly a Purim dish) and liver paste and black radish. 
And then about eight in the evening two young gentle- 
men called on Cousin Rose and capped the climax of the 
whole day by insisting on bringing in some beer in a 
pitcher from the corner saloon. There I was ! I could 
say all I wanted to about America being a sham, but 
no one would believe a word of it until I could prove 
that Segals and Abners and Schneers indulged in such 
luxuries as beer at home — a thing which no one could 
prove because it was not so. 



VIII 

"how do you like AMERICA?" 

NO, my first impression of America was right, and 
no mistake. With every day that passed I became 
more and more overwhelmed at the degeneration of my 
fellow-countrymen in this new home of theirs. Even 
their names had become emasculated and devoid of 
either character or meaning. Mordecai — a name full 
of romantic association — had been changed to the 
insipid monosyllable Max. Rebecca — mother of the 
race — was in America Becky. Samuel had been shorn 
to Sam, Abraham to Abe, Israel to Izzy. The sur- 
prising dearth of the precious words betrayed a most 
lamentable lack of imagination. Whole battalions of 
people were called Joe; the Harrys alone could have 
repopulated Vaslui; and of Morrises there was no end. 
With the women-folks matters went even worse. It did 
not seem to matter at all what one had been called at 
home. The first step toward Americanization was to 
fall into one or the other of the two great tribes of 
Rosies and Annies. 

This distressing transformation, I discovered before 
long, went very much deeper than occupation and the 

78 



**HOW DO YOU LIKE AMERICA?" 

externals of fashion. It pervaded every chamber of 
their life. Cut adrift suddenly from their ancient 
moorings, they were floundering in a sort of moral void. 
Good manners and good conduct, reverence and religion, 
had all gone by the board, and the reason was that these 
things were not American. A grossness of behavior, a 
loudness of speech, a certain repellent "American" 
smartness in intercourse, were thought necessary, if one 
did not want to be taken for a greenhorn or a boor. 
The ancient racial respect for elders had completely 
disappeared. Everybody was alike addressed as 
"thou" and "say"; and the worst of it was that when 
one contemplated American old age one was compelled 
to admit that there was a good deal of justification for 
slighting it. It had forfeited its claim to deference 
because it had thrown away its dignity. Tottering 
grandfathers, with one foot in the grave, had snipped 
off their white beards and laid aside their skull-caps and 
their snuff-boxes and paraded around the streets of a 
Saturday afternoon with cigarettes in their mouths, 
when they should have been lamenting the loss of the 
Holy City in the study-room adjoining the synagogue. 
And old women with crinkled faces had doffed their 
peruques and their cashmere kerchiefs and donned the 
sleeveless frocks of their daughters and adopted the 
frivolities of the powder-puff and the lip-stick. 

The younger folk, in particular, had undergone an 
intolerable metamorphosis. As they succeeded in pick- 
ing up English more speedily than their elders, they 

79 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

assumed a defiant attitude toward their parents, which 
the latter found themselves impotent to restrain and, 
in too many cases, secretly approved as a step toward 
the emancipation of their offspring. Parents, indeed, 
were altogether helpless under the domination of their 
own children. There prevailed a superstition in the 
quarter to the effect that the laws of America gave the 
father no power over the son, and that the police stood 
ready to interfere in behalf of the youngsters, if any 
attempt to carry out the barbarous European notion 
of family relations were made. 

Thus the younger generation was master of the 
situation, and kept the older in wholesome terror of 
itself. Mere slips of boys and girls went around to- 
gether and called it love after the American fashion. 
The dance-halls were thronged with them. The parks 
saw them on the benches in pairs until all hours of the 
morning, and they ran things in their parents' homes 
to suit themselves, particularly when their families were 
partially dependent on them for support. Darker 
things than these were happening. These were the 
shameful days when Allen Street, in the heart of Little 
Rumania, was honeycombed with houses of evil repute, 
and the ignorant, untamed daughters of immi- 
grants furnished the not always unwilling victims. 
And for the first time in history Jewish young men 
by the score were drifting into the ranks of the 
criminal. 

The young, however, were not the only offenders, 

§0 



**HOW DO YOU LIKE AMERICA?" 

The strong wine of American freedom was going to the 
heads of all ages alike. The newspapers of the Ghetto 
were continually publishing advertisements and offering 
rewards for the arrest of men who had deserted their 
wives and children. Hundreds of husbands who had 
parted from their families in Europe with tears in their 
eyes, and had promised, quite sincerely, to send for 
them as soon as they had saved up enough money, 
were masquerading as bachelors and offering themselves 
in wedlock to younger women for love or for money. 
Very often the entanglement reached that screaming 
stage which lies on the borderland of tragedy and farce, 
when the European wife, having been secretly and 
hurriedly sent for by her American relatives, appeared 
on the scene and dragged the culprit before the rabbi 
or the law-court. 

Whence had my countrymen got their sickening 
habits of carelessness and downright filthiness.'' It was 
impossible to pass through the streets after dark without 
being hit from above by a parcel of garbage or a pail of 
dirty water. Where was the good of dressing the chil- 
dren in expensive white clothes and white kid shoes and, 
apparently, never washing their poor little shrunken 
pale faces? A new pest of scurrying creatures unheard 
of at home had made their appearance here, which 
shared the dwellings of my friends and got into their 
food and their beds; and the amazing part of it was 
that no one seemed to mind them beyond making jokes 
about them and using the word by which they were 

81 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

called as a nickname for one's neighbors or even as a 
pet-name for one's own offspring. 

Ah, the blessed life we had left behind! And for 
what? To chase after a phantom raised by Couza the 
fanatic and the humbug. To follow a will-o'-the-wisp 
and sink in the quagmire of this repulsive Gehenna. 
Back there at home the houses were low and made of 
mud, and instead of hardwood floors the ground was 
plastered with fresh clay — mixed with manure to give 
it solidity — which had to be renewed every Friday. 
A family occupied but one room, or two at the most; 
but the houses were individual and sufficient, and the 
yard was spacious and green in summer, filled with 
trees and flowers to delight the senses. Business men 
scarcely earned in a week what a peddler or an operator 
made here in a day, but they were free men and had a 
standing in the community, and with God's help they 
supported their families in decency. They were not 
unattached, drifting nobodies, as every one was here. 
Life ran along smoothly on an unpretentious plane. 
There was no ambition for extravagance, and therefore 
no unhappiness through the lack of luxuries. Homes 
in Vaslui were not furnished with parlor sets of velvet, 
and the women-folks did not wear diamonds to market; 
but, on the other hand, they did not have to endure the 
insolence of the instalment agent, who made a fearful 
scene whenever he failed to receive his weekly payment. 
No one was envious because his neighbor's wife had 
finer clothes and costlier jewels than his own had. The 

82 



**HOW DO YOU LIKE AMERICA?" 

pride of a family was in its godliness and in its respected 
forebears. Such luxury as there was consisted in heavy 
copper utensils and silver candelabra, which were passed 
on as heirlooms from generation to generation — solid, 
substantial things, not the fleeting vanities of dress and 
upholstery. 

The prices of things in America were extortionate. 
The rental per month for a dark, noisome "apartment" 
on Rivington Street would have paid for a dwelling in 
Vaslui for an entire year. A shave cost ten cents, 
which was half a franc; if we had had to pay that much 
for it in Vaslui the whole community would have 
turned barbers. When I asked my cousin landlady 
how much my room-rent would come to, she told me 
that every one paid fifty cents a week. Two francs 
fifty! I tried to calculate all the possible things that 
my parents could buy for that vast sum at home if I 
were to desist from the extravagance of living in a 
house, and I resolved that as soon as I found work I 
would try to devise some substitute, and send the 
money home where it could be put to some sane use. 

My Americanized compatriots were not happy, by 
their own confession. As long as they kept at work or 
prospered at peddling, they affected a hollow gaiety 
and delighted in producing a roll of paper dollars 
(which they always carried loose in their pockets, 
instead of keeping them securely in purses as at home) 
on the least provocation, and frequented the coffee- 
houses, and indulged in high talk about their abilities 

83 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

and their prosperity, and patronizingly inquired of the 
greenhorn how he hked America, and smiled in a 
knowing way when the greenhorn replied by cursing 
Columbus. But no sooner did he lose his job or fail 
in the business of peddling than he changed his tune and 
sighed for the fleshpots of his native home, and hung 
his head when asked how he was getting on, and 
anathematized America, and became interested in 
socialism. At such times it was quite apparent that 
America's hold on his affections was very precarious — 
a thing that needed constant reinforcing by means of 
very definite, material adhesives to keep it from 
ignominious collapse. 

How feeble his attachment to his adoptive land was, 
and how easily his sentiments shifted from adoration 
to indifference or contempt, was strikingly illustrated 
by the various and contrasting names he had for 
America. Now it was gratefully termed the home of 
freedom and then, with a shade of irony in the tone, he 
referred to it as the land of gold. If he brought home 
a satisfactory bargain from the pushcart merchant he 
beamed and sang the praises of the "all-right country," 
and the next moment if the article turned out to be 
discolored or rotten or otherwise defective he fussed and 
fumed and swore that there never had been such a 
stronghold of fakes in all the world as this same America. 
His fondest hope was to become a "citisnik" of the 
Republic, but the merest scratching of the surface 
showed beyond a doubt that his desire for naturalization 

84 



"HOW DO YOU LIKE AMERICA?" 

did not have its roots in any conversion to the principles 
of democratic self-government, but rather in certain 
eminently human motives. Abe Sussman, for instance, 
entertained an ambition to become a street-cleaner 
because he hated peddling and because his brother-in- 
law, Joel, who had come here before him, was in that 
service. Jake Field had a crippled mother at home 
who had once before been brought over at ruinous 
expense, only to be excluded by the despots of Ellis 
Island. He was certain that the American Govern- 
ment would think twice before rejecting the parent of 
a full-fledged voter. Joe Katchke was perfectly frank 
in telling you that if he only had a pull with the district 
leader — which, of course, he could not have as long as 
he had no papers — he could get a letter from him to the 
street-car company's superintendent which, added to 
his fine command of English, would at once get him a 
job as a conductor. Harry Heller's ambitions were not 
quite so soaring. He, too, craved a pull with the 
governing powers, but only for the modest purpose of 
making the renewal of his peddler's license less trouble- 
some and of assuaging the rapacity of the policeman. 

As a greenhorn I got my share of the ridicule and the 
condescension and the bullying that fell to the lot of 
my kind. In my cousin's house I was constantly 
meeting Americanized young men who came to call on 
the girls, and invariably I must submit to the ever- 
lasting question and its concomitant, the idle grin: 
"How do you like America.-^" Well, after what I have 

85 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

given you of my impressions, you may readily guess 
that I did not like America; that, indeed, I very 
emphatically hated America. In my most courageous 
moments, which usually came to me when my young 
gentleman questioner was particularly insistent and 
particularly stupid, I declared so openly and with great 
stress, which declaration of mine was regularly met with 
loud peals of superior laughter, interspersed with phrases 
of that miserable gibberish which the Americanized 
of the foreign colony fondly regard as English, and 
which, even in those first days, I recognized for the sham 
it was. After such encounters I came away hating 
America more than ever. 

Yes, I hated America very earnestly on my first 
acquaintance with her. And yet I must confess here 
and now that for a whole year every letter that came 
from my parents in Vaslui was an offer to return home, 
and that I steadily refused to accept it. Those letters, 
by the by, added their very considerable share to the 
tragic burden of my readjustment, for my parents 
suggested that, if I liked America well enough to remain 
there, they would endeavor to raise the money and 
join me. And to this I was constrained to reply, 
"Vaslui is not for me, and America is not for you, dear 
parents mine." These words were obviously a confes- 
sion that our separation must remain indefinite. I did 
not want my parents to come to America, because I 
could not endure the thought of father as a match- 
peddler on Orchard Street; and since he was neither a 



**HOW DO YOU LIKE AMERICA?" 

shoemaker nor a woman's tailor nor a master of any 
of the other profitable professions in America, and since 
I was as yet far from equal to the task of supporting the 
family, there was nothing for us to do but to rest apart. 
But the odd thing was that I declined the alternative 
offer. Somehow, even in those dark days of greenhorn- 
hood, an occasional ray would penetrate through the 
gloom and reveal another America than that of the 
slums. 

And In the mean time the East Side Ghetto was my 
America, a theater within a theater, as it were. No, it 
was even more circumscribed than that. The outsider 
may imagine that the Ghetto is a unified, homogeneous 
country, but a little more intimate acquaintance will 
rectify that mistake. There are in it strata and sub- 
strata, each with a culture, a tradition, and a method of 
life peculiar to itself. The East Side is not a colony; 
it is a miniature federation of semi-independent, allied 
states. To be sure, it is a highly compact union, 
territorially. One traverses a square, and lo! he finds 
himself in a new polity. The leap in civilization from 
Ridge Street to Madison Street is a much wider one 
than that between Philadelphia and Seattle. The line 
of demarkation is drawn sharply even to the point of 
language — the most obvious of national distinctions. 
Though both speak Yiddish, the Jew from Austrian 
Poland will at first hardly understand his coreligionist 
from Lithuania. Their dialects differ enormously in 
accent and intonation and very appreciably in vocabu- 

7. 87 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

lary. And each separate group entertains a humorous, 
kindly contempt for the speech and the manners and the 
foibles of all the others. 

As I had come from Vaslui, it was my lot to settle in 
that odd bit of world which I have referred to as Little 
Rumania. It was bounded on the east by Clinton 
Street, with Little Galicia extending on the other side 
to the East River; by Grand Street on the south, with 
the Russians and Lithuanians beyond; and on the 
north lay the untracked wilds surrounding Tompkins 
Square Park, which to me was the vast dark continent 
of the "real Americans." 

Even as far back as 1900 this Little Rumania was 
beginning to assume a character of its own. Already it 
had more restaurants than the Russian quarter — estab- 
lishments with signs in English and Rumanian, and 
platters of liver paste, chopped eggplant, and other dis- 
tinctive edibles in the windows. On Rivington Street 
and on Allen Street the Rumanian delicatessen-store was 
making its appearance, with its goose-pastrama and 
kegs of ripe olives and tubs of salted vine-leaves (which, 
when wrapped around ground meat, make a most de- 
licious dish), and the moon-shaped cash caval cheese 
made of sheep's milk, and, most important of all, the 
figure of an impossible American version of a Rumanian 
shepherd in holiday costume, with a flute at his waxen 
lips, standing erect in the window. Unlike the other 
groups of the Ghetto, the Rumanian is a hon vivant 
and a pleasure-lover; therefore he did not long delay 

88 



**HOW DO YOU LIKE AMERICA?" 

to establish the pastry-shop (while his Russian neighbor 
was establishing the lecture platform) , whither of a Satur- 
day afternoon, after his nap, he would betake himself 
with his friends and his ladies and consume dozens 
of dainty confections with ice-cold water. 

He it was, also, who, out of a complex desire to serve 
his stomach and his faith, brought forth an institution 
which has now become universal in America — the dairy 
lunch-room — which, owing to the exigencies of religion, 
was originally just what it is called, a place where 
nothing but the most palatable dishes built out of 
milk and milk products were to be had, and where no 
morsel that had been in the vicinity of meat could be 
obtained for love or money. And, most characteristic 
of all, he transplanted that unique near-Eastern affair, 
the kazin, or coffee-house, which is a place of congrega- 
tion for the socially-minded, and where the drinking of 
fragrant, pasty Turkish coffee is merely incidental to a 
game of cards, or billiards, or dominoes. 

This was America, and for this we had walked here — 
a gay Rumanian city framed in the stench and the 
squalor and the oppressive, noisy tenements of New 
York's dingiest slums. As I have already intimated, 
of the broader life and the cleaner air of that vast theater 
within which this miniature stage was set I was hardly 
aware. What I knew of it came to me vaguely by 
hearsay in occasional allusions to a hazy, remote world 
called variously "up-town" and "the South," to which 
the more venturesome of my fellows now and then 

89 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

resorted, only to find their spunk failing them and to 
return forthwith. In addition, there was the police- 
man, who made life miserable for the peddlei, while 
accepting his bribe. He was a representative of "up- 
town," for as soon as his tyrannical day's work was 
over he vanished into the mysteries of that uncharted 
region. There was, likewise, the school-teacher, with 
her neat figure and sweet smile, and a bevy of admiring 
little children always clinging to her skirts as she tried 
to make her way from the corner of Eldridge Street 
"up-town." Now and then in my search for work I 
wandered into Broadway and across Fifth Avenue, and 
stared at the extravagant displays in the shop windows 
and the obvious wealth (judging from their clothes) of 
the passers-by. But altogether I remained untouched 
by the life of greater America. It merely brushed me 
in passing, but it was too far removed from my sphere 
to affect me one way or the other. 



IX 

VENTURES AND ADVENTURES 

TO return to my cousin's camp and the order of 
events. 
The two days allotted to a guest being over, I was 
given broadly to understand that I must enter the race 
for American dollars. During the remainder of that 
week and throughout the entire week following I went 
about "trying." Early in the morning I would go 
down-stairs to buy a World, and after breakfast I would 
get one of the children to translate the want advertise- 
ments for me. When I glanced at the length and the 
number of those columns, I saw that I would not be 
long in getting rich. There were hundreds of shops and 
factories and offices, it seemed, that wanted my help. 
They literally implored me to come. They promised 
me high wages, and regular pay, and fine working condi- 
tions. And then I would go and blunder around for 
hours, trying to find where they were, stand in line 
with a hundred other applicants, approach timidly when 
my turn came, and be passed up with a significant 
glance at my appearance. Now and then, in a sweat- 
shop, I would get a hearing; and then the proposition 

91 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

was that if I would work without pay for two weeks, 
and give ten dollars for instruction, I would be taught 
to be a presser or an operator. The thing baffled me. 
I could not bridge the gulf between the advertised 
appeals for help and this arrogant indifference of the 
employing superintendent. 

Half the time I had not the remotest idea of what was 
wanted. I had been told what a butcher was and what 
was meant by a grocery-store. But what were shipping 
clerks, and stock clerks, and bill clerks, and all the other 
scores of varieties of clerk that were so eagerly sought.'^ 
However, I did not let trifles discourage me. There 
was only one way to succeed in America, my friends 
continually told me, and that was by constant, tireless, 
undiscriminating trying. If you failed in one place, or 
in ten places, or in a hundred places, you must not give 
up. Keep on trying and you are bound to be taken 
somewhere. Moreover, American occupations were so 
flimsy, they required so little skill or experience, that a 
fellow with a little intelligence and the normal amount 
of daring could bluff his way into almost any job. The 
main thing was to say "yes" whenever you were asked 
whether you could do this or that. That was the way 
everybody got work. The employer never knew the 
difference. So I followed the counsel of the wise, in so 
far as my limited spunk permitted, and knocked at 
every door in sight. Time and time again I applied, 
at department stores in need of floor-walkers (that, I 
thought, could certainly require no special gifts), at 

92 



VENTURES AND ADVENTURES 

offices where stenographers were wanted, at factories 
demanding foremen. But my friends' predictions 
appeared to be only half-true. Of failure there was, 
indeed, no end, but that ultimate inevitable success 
which I had been promised did not come. There was 
nothing to do but change my tactics. 

Then there was the problem of distances. I could 
not dream of paying car fares everywhere I went. 
Even if I had had the nickel, the mere thought of 
spending twenty-five bani at every turn would have 
seemed an appalling extravagance. And, somehow, the 
jobs that I supposed I had a fair chance of getting were 
always at the ends of creation. An errand-boy was 
wanted in Long Island City, and a grocer was looking 
for an assistant in Hoboken. By the time I had reached 
one place and had had my services refused, I was too 
late in getting to the others. And always I was 
refused. Why? At last one morning a butcher in the 
upper Eighties gave me the answer with pungent 
frankness. I had got to the spot before any one else, 
and when I saw it in his eye that he was about to pass 
me up, I gathered all the pluck that was in me and 
demanded the reason. He looked me over from head 
to foot, and then, with a contemptuous glance at my 
shabby foreign shoes (the alien's shoes are his Judas), 
he asked me whether I supposed he wanted a greenhorn 
in his store. I pondered that query for a long time. 
Here, I thought, was indeed new light on America. 
Her road to success was a vicious circle, and no mistake. 

93 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

In order to have a job one must have American clothes, 
and the only way to get American clothes was to find 
a job and earn the price. Altogether a desperate 
situation. 

Then my relative suggested peddling. Here I was 
occupying part of a bed that could bring fifty cents a 
week, and paying nothing for it. Moreover, she was 
giving me meals. This was America. Everybody 
hustled, and nearly everybody peddled. If I had some 
money I might start right off on the grand scale with a 
pushcart. But there were other ways. There were 
lots of young fellows from Vaslui, of just as good 
family as mine, who sold pretzels in a basket, or mantles 
from a hand-bag— anything they could find — and paid 
for their board, and bought clothes for themselves, and 
even saved money. Here, for instance, was Louis 
Carniol, whom everybody at home had considered a 
ne'er-do-well — a schlim-mezalnik. Did I notice how 
nicely he was dressed .f^ Did I know that he had money 
in the bank.? Yes, I need not look incredulous, for 
only the week before he had sent home fifty francs. 
And there was Rose Marculescu, a mere girl, and in 
three months she had nearly paid for the steamer ticket 
her brother had sent her. Of course the lucky ones and 
the clever ones got jobs. But what could a body do? 
In the land of Columbus one did what one could, and 
there was no disgrace in doing anything. A shoemaker 
was just as good in America as a doctor, as long as he 
worked and made money and paid for everything. 

94 



VENTURES AND ADVENTURES 

I denied the imputation that I was ashamed, and 
asked her what she proposed that I should do, con- 
sidering that my fifteen cents had gone for ferry rides. 
She answered that she proposed to lend me the money 
for a start, and irrelevantly quoted the Rumanian adage 
about when thousands are lost hundreds don't count. 
So I accepted her dollar, and let her lend me a small 
brass tray she had brought from home; and in the 
afternoon I went around to Orchard Street and invested 
my borrowed capital in two boxes of chocolates. 
Monday morning you might have seen me at the hour 
of seven standing at the corner of Fourteenth Street and 
Fifth Avenue, inviting the crowds that rushed by to 
work to partake of my wares. I was very enthusiastic 
in spite of the nipping cold. But, oddly enough, no 
one in that whole rolling sea of humanity seemed to be 
fond of chocolates. Moreover, the policeman took a 
strange dislike to me and chased me from one corner 
to another. Once a young American humorist flipped 
my tray in passing, and nearly succeeded in spill- 
ing my entire stock under the feet of the hurrying 
throng. 

However, late in the day my affairs took a turn for 
the better. Toward nine o'clock the whole army of 
peddlers came forth into the daylight, and the winter 
air grew suddenly warm with friendly babbling and 
mutual offerings of assistance. The mere sight of 
them, with their variegated equipages and their motley 
goods, was reassuring. There were peddlers with push- 

95 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

carts and peddlers with boxes, peddlers with movable 
stands and peddlers with baskets, peddlers with bundles, 
with pails, with satchels and suit-cases and trunks, with 
an infinite assortment of contrivances designed to 
display the merchandise and to enthrall the eye. Some 
of the carts were ornamented with bunting and colored 
paper edging and Christmas bells and sprays of holly; 
others carried glass show-cases and feather dusters; a 
great number were provided with tops built of lumber and 
oilcloth. They came pouring in from all directions — 
men with patriarchal faces and white beards, old women 
draped in fantastic shawls out of the Arabian Nights, 
boys with piping voices, young mothers with babes in 
their arms. On they came, scurrying through the 
congested traffic, dodging vehicles, trudging with their 
burdens, laboriously wheeling their heavy-laden carts — 
these representatives of all the nations of the earth 
making for their appointed posts in the international 
exposition that stretched along Fourteenth Street and 
up Sixth Avenue as far as Twenty-third Street. It 
seemed to me, as I looked out upon this vast itinerant 
commerce, whose stocks were drawn from the treasures 
of the East and the industries of the West, that I was 
no mere detached trafficker engaged in a despised trade. 
I was a member of a great and honored mercantile 
guild. 

I found myself surrounded by friends. An elderly 
man with a telescope case set up camp beside me and 
proceeded to remove therefrom, in the manner of a 

96 



VENTURES AND ADVENTURES 

conjurer, endless packages of Oriental spreads and 
table-cloths. As he drew one forth, he shook it gently 
out of its folds, held it up to view with a pleased ex- 
pression, made some queer passes with his hands, like 
an acrobat about to ascend a tight-rope, and placed it 
affectionately on his shoulder. I glanced up at him 
and shied away. His head was swathed in a white 
turban, and with those laces hanging down his person 
he had the air of some barbarous Eastern priest. The 
effect was heightened by his swarthy face and grizzly 
black beard. I was somewhat alarmed, and was about 
to move on, when he suddenly spoke up to me in my 
native tongue. 

"How is business?" he inquired. 

I confessed timidly that I had not yet made a sale. 
Then, in an access of boldness and with a sinking 
suspicion of occult powers at his command, I asked him 
how he had recognized me for a Rumanian. His eyes 
twinkled with amusement as they looked meaningly 
at my shoes. 

*' From Vaslui, for a guess," he went on. "I am from 
Berlad myself. My family is still there. Can't get 
enough together to bring them over. I am an old 
peddler — know the game — have been here once before, 
years ago, when I was a boy. Ah, times are hard. 
America is not what it used to be — ^played out. Too 
many in the business. They pamper the customer and 
ruin the trade. God! if I had not been such a fool, to 
go back and waste all those good years in Rumania, 

97 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

serving the Wallachian with a gun and a bayonet, I 
could have had a store on Fifth Avenue by now. But 
you are a youngster. It's your America. I wish I 
were in your shoes. — Nice Syrian laces, lady?" 

All this went over my head. I was as yet too fresh 
from the steerage to grasp its significance. But when, 
his persuasive arts having failed, he informed his 
customer that those Syrian laces were meant for people 
with money and not for dickering paupers, he came 
back to me with more definite counsel. 

"You'll learn, all right. Never fear. How much do 
you sell those chocolates for.^* All right, here is my 
penny for a starter — a saftia. But that is too cheap. 
You'll do more business if you ask five cents. Your 
American likes to be charged a stiff price; otherwise he 
thinks you are selling him trash. Move along; elbow 
your way through the crowds in front of the stores, seek 
out the women with kids; shove your tray into their 
faces. Don't be timid. America likes the nervy ones. 
This is the land where modesty starves. And yell, 
never stop yelling. Advertising sells the goods. Here 
is a formula to begin on: 'Candy, ladies! Finest in 
America. Only a nickel, a half-a-dime, five cents.' 
Go on, now; try it.'* 

I did, reluctantly and with some misgiving. What 
would I do if those elegantly dressed ladies should 
resent my aggressiveness and call the dreaded police- 
man.? Moreover, there were altogether too many 
mischievous youngsters in the throng who seemed bent 

98 



VENTURES AND ADVENTURES 

on adventure, and I wished no disaster to befall me. 
So I moved along cautiously, applying my friend's 
advice only by degrees. But it astonished and de- 
lighted me to see how magically it worked. I was really 
making sales. Incredible as it seemed, these people 
actually paid five cents for every piece that cost me 
less than two-thirds of one cent. Once a customer — a 
man — gave me a dime and refused to take change, and 
I began to wonder whether I could not raise the price 
to ten cents — whether, as a matter of fact, there was 
any limit to the gullibility of my customers. 

One thing, indeed, that impressed me right early in 
my contact with the world outside the Ghetto was the 
almost ludicrous liberality of American life. Every 
one was sufficiently dressed in the streets of New York. 
At home people who were thought of as in comfortable 
circumstances usually wore their clothes and shoes 
away past the patch stage and thought nothing of it. 
In America nobody, except the newly landed and a 
certain recognizable type styled a bum, wore patched 
garments. Then, again, in Vaslui none but young 
ladies of marriageable age wore gloves; for any one else 
the article would have been regarded as silly dandyism. 
Of course, most of us wore worsted mittens, home- 
knitted, in cold weather. But I am talking of gloves, 
a very different thing in appearance as well as spiritual 
significance. In New York it amused me not a little 
to observe that even teamsters and street laborers wore 
gloves at their work, to preserve, I supposed, their 

99 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

dainty hands. Indeed, one of the most curious things 
in America was the fact that, if you went merely by their 
dress, you could not tell a bank president from his 
office-boy. 

In the mean time my first day's peddling made one 
thing certain : I was a successful business man. "Try- 
ing" was a thing of the past. I began to hold my head 
high. And that evening I had the satisfaction of going 
to a Rumanian restaurant on Allen Street and ordering 
the first meal I had ever paid for in America. It 
consisted of a dish of chopped eggplant with olive-oil, 
and a bit of pot-roast with mashed potato and gravy. 
It did cost ten cents; but I was in an extravagant mood 
that night. I had a right to be, for while I dined I 
reckoned up my earnings for the day and found that 
they were no less than seventy cents, not counting the 
chocolates I had eaten myself. 

Thenceforth I returned to my restaurant every night. 
It was a great comfort, after a day spent out in the cold, 
to go into a cozy room, and have a warm meal, and hear 
my native Rumanian spoken. Now and then a 
musician would wander in and gladden our hearts with 
a touching melody of home, and we would all join in 
until the tears drowned our voices. I began to make 
acquaintances; and after the meal we would sit around 
at the tables, discussing America with her queer people 
and her queer language. Those of us who worked at 
the building trades and those who sold fruits and 
vegetables up-town brought back with them the most 

100 



VENTURES AND ADVENTURES 

amazing stories of their adventures in exile. The 
American, it appeared, was a spendthrift and a finick. 
His home had the most luxurious appointments, and 
his pantry was loaded with fabulous edibles. He 
affected a curious liking for hushed whispers and silent 
footsteps. His women-folks were meticulous cranks. 
His language was a corrupted jargon of Yiddish and 
Rumanian. From the oddities of the native's life we 
would come back to things that touched us nearer. We 
sighed or bragged over our business ventures, bestowed 
admiration or advice; and when the clock that hung 
over the display of victuals on the counter struck 
midnight we found that our talk had drifted back to 
where it had started — to gossip about the latest arrivals 
and the recent news from home. 

In the course of my adventures as a man of business 
I was frequently brought in touch with school-boys, 
and the encounter always left me wistful and envious. 
Fortunate youths! Here they were, at such tender 
years, and they already talked a very "high" order of 
English — it was "high" enough to go over my head for 
the most part — and studying profound things out of 
profound books whose very titles were an unfathomable 
mystery to me. What was in those great stacks of 
books that they always carried around with them? I 
tried to draw them into talk in an effort to find out; and 
as the colloquy progressed I grew bold enough to ask 
the one great question that lay nearest my heart. 
Were they all going to be doctors.'^ To which they 

101 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

answered with great shouts of laughter and called me 
"greeny." Only once I managed to draw a young 
gentleman out of his reserve. "A doctor!" he sneered. 
"Lord! no. Who on earth wants to go to school half 
his life and then fool around sick people for the rest of 
it.f^ Not me. I am going to high school because mother 
is silly and because I ain't old enough yet to get my 
working-papers. But just you wait until next year, 
and see how quick I chuck it and go to business." 
This was a tremendous revelation. How any one with 
the chance of becoming a doctor could dream of wanting 
to do something else was something I could not get 
through my head at all. Oh, if only I had their luck! 

With my royal ambition constantly before me, and 
the demands of my business, learning English was 
becoming a necessity. I felt, besides, that going on 
living in America without knowing the American's 
language was stupid. But the East Side offered few 
facilities and plenty of hindrances for the study. The 
'abominations of English orthography I mastered early 
enough, so that I could spell hundreds of words without 
knowing their meaning. But the practical use of the 
language was another matter. A greenhorn on Riving- 
ton Street did not dare open his mouth in English unless 
he wanted to bring down upon himself a whole torrent 
of ridicule and critical assistance. The mere fact that 
he had arrived in America a week later than a fellow- 
alien seemed to justify the assumption that he knew 
less of the language, and East Side etiquette demanded 

102 



VENTURES AND ADVENTURES 

that he should defer to the "Americanized" and accept 
their corrections without question. 

At first I was inclined to be meek and let myself be 
taught by my elders and betters. I even let them 
laugh at me when I spoke in my native tongue. In 
America, it appeared, it was against the rules of good 
breeding to call things by their right names. Certain 
articles must always be referred to in English, irrespec- 
tive of whether one was talking Yiddish or Rumanian. 
But as soon as I saw through their flimsy pretensions — 
which did not require very long, nor any special talents 
— I revolted. Indeed, I turned the tables on my critics, 
and started to do some laughing myself. There was no 
scarcity of occasion. My friends were finding English 
contemptibly easy. That notion of theirs that it was 
a mixture of Yiddish and Rumanian, although partly 
justified, was yielding some astonishing results. Little 
Rumania was in the throes of evolving a new tongue — a 
crazy-quilt whose prevailing patches were, sure enough, 
Yiddish and Rumanian, with here and there a sprinkling 
of denatured English. They felt no compunction 
against pulling up an ancient idiom by the roots and 
transplanting it bodily into the new soil. One heard 
such phrases as "I am going on a marriage,'* *'I should 
live so," "a milky dinner." They called a cucumber a 
"pickle" and an eggplant a "blue tomato" because in 
Rumanian a pickle was a sour cucumber and tomatoes 
and eggplants were distinguished from one another 

merely by their color. All balconies were designated 
8 103 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

as fire-escapes because the nearest thing to a fire-escape 
known at home was a second-floor balcony. 

I found the language of America much harder than 
that. One of the first purchases I made out of my 
peddler's earnings was a copy of Harkavy's Dictionary. 
As it was my purpose to learn the whole English lan- 
guage and nothing less, I meant to start at the letter A 
and proceed alphabetically right through to the end. 
That appeared to me the surest way of not missing 
anything. But when I beheld that bulky volume, and 
found on the title-page something about thirty thousand 
words, my enthusiasm got a little chilled. I had never 
realized that Americans were so loquacious. Why, 
even if I were to learn a hundred words every day, I 
could hardly hope to master enough vocabulary for an 
intelligent conversation in less than three years, to say 
nothing of studying medicine. Moreover, experience 
had already taught me that words, even when perfectly 
memorized and pronounced, had an exasperating way 
of turning into nonsense as soon as they were put to 
the practical test. Supposing you did know what 
"give" meant, or "turn," and had managed, in addition, 
to discover the meaning of such particles as "up," 
"down," "in," and the like, you were still at sea as to 
the connotations of such phrases as "give in," "give 
up," "give way," "turn off," "turn out," and no end 
of others. No more helpful was the dictionary in your 
search for the sense of such bewildering oddities as 
"that will do" (which sounded like "dadldoo"), 

104 



VENTURES AND ADVENTURES 

"rushing the growler," "inc." (seen on signs in the 
street), and "Dr." (obviously having nothing to do 
with the thing you wanted to be). There must be 
some magic glue outside the dictionary that held them 
together. So I added a Bible to my library and studied 
the English version side by side with the Hebrew 
original. I read the signs on the streets and the 
legends in the shop windows, and in the evening hunted 
up whatever words I could remember in my dictionary. 
Now and then I made an incursion into the Evening 
Journal. But it required a gigantic effort of the will 
to keep up the grind. The very fact that I could 
read the news in two or three other languages was 
a handicap. 

In my adventures with the outer world I made an- 
other discovery. Bargaining was discouraged. I 
stopped in front of a grocery-store to buy a basket of 
what I thought were plums of a species I particularly 
liked. The man asked ten cents; I offered him six, 
and he calmly put the basket back in its place and 
proceeded to walk into the store. I called him back 
and suggested splitting the difference. Whereupon his 
face assumed a threatening shade and I handed over 
my dime. When I reached home I discovered that my 
plums were tomatoes. I set to work to prepare a long 
and convincing speech which opened in the petitionary 
vein and ended in menace. Then I marched back to 
the store with my heart thumping. I had scarcely 
opened my mouth when the salesman, divining my 

105 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

mission, took the package out of my hand and handed 
me back my ten cents. 

This was something more than the hberahty I had 
observed before. It was a pecuHar generous trustful- 
ness, of which I was to see more and more as I went 
on living in America. My old friend Yankel Bachman, 
for instance, was employed for a brief period as assistant 
to a milk-driver, and it made me marvel to hear him 
tell how his customers left bottles with money in them 
at the doors, where anybody could have taken them, 
and how he in turn left the milk in the same places. 
Somehow they never were taken — or at least he never 
heard of it. Imagine, I used to say to myself — imagine 
doing business after that fashion in Vaslui. Once a 
newspaper-wagon sped by and dropped a bundle of 
magazines right at my feet. I picked it up and was 
walking away with it when a man emerged from a 
stationery-shop and politely, though smilingly, informed 
me that it belonged to him. I gave it up, of course, in 
confusion, but I thought that if that had happened at 
home the case would have gone to the courts before the 
owner could have proved his right to the goods. And 
we were honest people in Vaslui; only our ideas were 
different. This undiscriminating confidence in God and 
man was a distinctly American peculiarity. 

On one occasion, however, the confidence I had come 
to feel in American people was cruelly abused. I had 
had an unprofitable day on Fourteenth Street and had 
remained out till late in the night. To forget my 

106 



VENTURES AND ADVENTURES 

troubles I stopped on the way home at one of the 
"penny arcades" on the Bowery, and amused myself 
by looking into those forerunners of the movies which 
showed a single still-life picture free of charge and a 
dramatic performance as soon as a cent was deposited 
in the slot. A somewhat shabby-looking but decidedly 
friendly individual approached my machine and, much 
to my surprise, started it going with a penny of his own 
for my benefit. I asked him to share the pleasure with 
me by applying an eye to one of the two openings, but 
he declined on the ground that he had already seen 
everything in that place. This led up to his inviting 
me to a much finer place farther down the street where 
the pictures were of a superior character. As we 
walked along he suddenly bent down and picked up a 
purse. "See that fat woman there turning into 
Houston Street.'^" he asked me. "She dropped it." 
I could not see her, but that was of no consequence. 
Then my friend proceeded to give me a rapid account 
of his misfortunes — his dismissal without cause from a 
place he had held for ten years, his sick wife and dying 
little boy — and ended by thanking the Lord, before he 
had any idea whether there was anything in the purse 
to be thankful for, because He had rescued us — he 
could see that I, too, was poor — from our poverty. 
Finally he opened the wallet, and found in one pocket a 
bunch of keys and in the other a nickel and an Elevated 
ticket. With trembling hands and dilated nostrils he 
now turned to unlock the center compartment, and he 

107 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

heaved an "Ah" of rehef as he drew forth a crumpled 
twenty-dollar bill. But at the sight of the tremendous 
find his reason seemed all at once to have deserted him; 
for the first thing he said, as soon as he got back his 
breath, was, "It is not right, and it is dangerous. Let 
us go to the police station and give it up." 

I had a dreadful time, with my scanty English and 
my excited nerves, to persuade him not to do such a 
foolish thing. "It's ours, is it not.^ " I cried. "Besides 
the woman looked rich; she would not miss it, and we 
could make good use of it." Only when we got in 
front of the Bleecker Street station did he come to his 
senses. "All right," he said. "We'll go over to my 
sister's house and I'll get ten dollars for your share. 
She lives up on Seventh Street." "Why not go into 
a store," I asked, "and get it changed? " "It's danger- 
ous, I tell you; we'll get caught," he insisted. "Say," 
he cried with a sudden inspiration, "you say you are a 
peddler. Give me ten dollars and you keep the bill." 
But I did not have ten dollars. I only had seventy- 
five cents. He looked incredulous. As we approached 
his sister's house he began to run off. "Wait a minute," 
I yelled. "I can't let you take the money with you. 
How do I know you'll come back.'^" He gave me an 
injured glance, and quite justly asked me why he 
should trust me when I had no faith in his integrity. I 
might at least let him have my seventy-five cents as 
partial security. But to this I answered with a laugh 
that if he could trust me with nine dollars and a quarter 

108 



VENTURES AND ADVENTURES 

he might as well trust me with ten dollars. My logic 
seemed to carry conviction. He turned over the bill 
to me (but not the keys and the rest of the find) and set 
off on a dash for the sisterly home. I waited half an 
hour, but he never came. The next day being Sunday, 
I mysteriously informed my cousin that I was going 
to Coney Island. She looked astonished and I grinned. 
"I thought you complained about business being poor," 
she asked. Then I waved the bill in her face and told 
her the whole story. "You had better wait," she 
advised; "it may be one of those American fakes." 
About ten o'clock "brother-in-law" Couza arrived on 
his weekly visit, and she asked him into the children's 
room for an important conference. My heart sank as 
I heard his deep laugh through the keyhole. It was 
a Confederate bill. 

After two weeks of chocolates I turned to toys. Suc- 
cess begets greed, and even a dollar a day will lose some 
of its first glamour by monotonous repetition. Besides, 
the holiday rush was fast drawing to a close. If I was 
to save up anything toward a better day, I must deal 
in some article that would not tempt my palate. And, 
as the man who sold me the new merchandise pointed 
out, toys had various other advantages over candies. 
They went at a superior price; the profit was greater; 
and, whereas chocolates spoiled when kept overnight, 
toys could be returned if not disposed of. Neverthe- 
less, when the season was over and I was left with some 
eight dollars' worth of sheet-metal acrobats, I discovered 

109 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

that my man had changed his address and was nowhere 
to be found. That was the beginning of my American 
disasters and simultaneously of my American education. 
For that eight dollars represented all my savings for 
the season, not counting my canceled debt to Mrs. 
Segal, and I was left to starve and "try" until I got 
my first job, or from Christmas to the end of January. 
Of course, I could have gone back to my relatives, now 
that my credit had proved good, but my pride told me 
that it was better to walk the streets after the tea- 
houses were closed than to be lectured. 



X 

PURIFICATIONS 

NO doubt this was proper pride, but in the month 
and a half that followed I often had good reason to 
feel that the price I was made to pay for it was a trifle 
extortionate. I had come to New York in search of 
riches and adventure. Well, now, here at least was 
adventure a-plenty, even if the riches were a bit scarce. 
To be sure, the adventures I had most craved were of 
quite another sort. But, having neglected to specify 
in advance, it was not my place to complain against 
Destiny when she chose to put the broad interpretation 
on my order and supplied me with an ample stock of all 
the varieties in her shop. All the same, I could not 
for the life of me see any fun in the thing, not, at any 
rate, while it lasted. Think of me as devoid of imagina- 
tion all you please, the fact remains that, with the best 
intentions in the world, I never succeeded in tapping 
the romance of my experiences. Going without meals 
two-thirds of the time was just as dull as it could be; 
tramping through the slushy, wind-swept streets while 
the rest of the world snuggled and snored under its 
warm covers was monstrously nasty; and the callous- 
ness, the indifference, the smugness of employers and 

111 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

acquaintances alike were both dull and nasty, and soul- 
destroying to boot. No, I got precious little poetry 
out of my adventures. Wisdom, perhaps — of the 
toughening kind. By the time my trials were over I 
had ceased to be a boy. I had become a man, with the 
disillusionment, the wiliness, and, I fear, the cynicism 
of a man. 

I had thought that that first week preceding my 
peddling ventures had exhausted all America's possibili- 
ties of hardship and disheartening failure. But that 
was because I was a greenhorn, unversed in the ways 
of Columbus's land. It was only now that I was to 
get my American baptism — that cleansing of the spirit 
by suffering which every one of us immigrants must 
pass through to prove himself worthy of his adoption. 
The population of Little Rumania was made up of two 
classes, the greens and the yellows. They were not 
stationary castes; every yellow had once been a green, 
and every green was striving and hoping to become a 
yellow some day. But in order to effect this coveted 
change of color and class there was but one thing for 
the new-comer to do — he must be purified. Purification 
— that was what, with telhng aptness, the East Side 
called the period of struggle, starvation, and dis- 
appointment in America, which was the lot of the green. 
If a fellow-townsman of mine chanced to ask my 
cousin and former landlady whether she had seen me 
and how I was getting on, she answered apathetically 
and as if it were only what one might expect, "Oh, he 

112 



PURIFICATIONS 

is bleaching out — getting purified, you know." People 
who had known my family in Vaslui would now and 
then pass me in the street or run into me in a tea-house, 
and the dialogue that then ensued was after this 
fashion : 

"Working?" 

"No, not yet." 

*'Um, getting properly purified. Oh, well, wait 
until you are a yellow. You'll be all right in America 
yet." 

And my friend would suddenly discover that he had 
important business in hand and bid me a breathless 
good-by. 

Happily I was not alone in my misery. A large 
percentage of those who had come to America on foot 
were, in a twofold sense, in the same shoes as I was, in 
spite of all the efforts of the newly formed Rumanian 
American Society to provide for the comfort and self- 
support of their compatriots. The dingy hotels on the 
Bowery were filled with them, and the communal 
kitchen on Broome Street saw scores of such of them 
as were willing to submit to charity, stand in line every 
day for their meal tickets. The "labor agencies" did 
a thriving business by finding jobs for them somewhere 
in "the South," which, however, turned out exceed- 
ingly short-lived, as those who managed to get back 
reported. With the help of some of my fellow-sufferers 
I picked up a variety of scraps of industrial information; 

but my extreme youth and my unconquerable timidity 

lis 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

prevented me from making any use of them. There 
was Ascher Gold, for instance, who for two entire weeks 
earned two-fifty a day by replacing a certain boiler- 
maker who had suddenly taken it into his head to refuse 
to work because he thought two-fifty a day not enough ! 
Then there was the office on Second Avenue which 
sent people wherever they wanted to go and even got 
places for them; but one had to know how to get 
friendly with its secretary, and buy him a cigar or a 
dish of ice-cream, before one stood any chance of even 
getting inside. Yankel, however, came and told me 
that after spending thirty cents on that unapproachable 
gentleman the best that he offered to do for him was to 
send him to work in a mine at the other end of the 
country. 

One of the objections that father had had to my going 
to America was that I was too young to be exposed to 
the dangers of a strange large city, and at the time I 
had laughed at his fears. But my enforced idleness, I 
found, was leading me into worse things than physical 
discomfort. For one thing, the persistent failure to 
find work has a curious effect on the mind. The victim 
begins by doubting whether he ever can be employed 
and ends up by fearing that he might! I used to 
approach a prospective employer with a kind of sinking 
dread lest he should take me; and in the morning as I 
set out on my daily round I would say, devoutly, "I 
am going to look for a job; Lord prevent that I should 
find one." In the solitude of the night, while lingering 

114 



PURIFICATIONS 

in the shelter of a doorway, I would take stock of my 
fix and steel my heart with resolution. "How long," 
I would ask myself, reproachfully, "can this state of 
affairs go on? I cannot live without meals forever. 
My shoes — those traitor shoes from home — will no 
longer keep out the snow. Sooner or later the folks 
in Vaslui are bound to guess or hear why I am ignoring 
their requests for help. And the more I put off getting a 
job the farther recedes the realization of my ambition." 
The coffee-houses I frequented were a continual bait. 
On the East Side respectability mingled freely with the 
underworld. These elegant resorts where well-dressed 
shopkeepers brought their bejeweled wives and treated 
them to fat suppers, became, toward midnight, the 
haunts of the pickpocket and the street- walker. Every 
now and then a young gentleman with piercing, restless 
eyes, faultlessly attired in modish clothes, high collar, 
and patent-leather boots, generously invited me to share 
a bite with him, and in the course of the meal painted 
me a dark picture of the fate of the fool who thought 
he could succeed in America with the antiquated no- 
tions he had brought with him from the old country. If 
I really wanted to make money and bring my family 
to America, he would show me how, just as he had 
shown others. It was quite easy, and the partnership 
basis was half-and-half. The landlord of the place 
made me a different proposal. An ambitious young 
fellow could get a girl to support him. He did not 
really have to marry her; he would only pose as her 

115 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

husband at a pinch. But as I was either too stupid 
or too scrupulous or too timid to avail myself of 
these opportunities, I went on getting purified, until 
the day came when I was left without the price of the 
indispensable World. Then once — but just once — I 
was sorely tempted to beg the penny of a likely- 
looking stranger, only to be arrested by a paralyzing 
shame at the thought. 

My parents did, surely enough, get wind of the actual 
state of things before long, and the minute detail with 
which they wrote about it made me suspect that the guess 
had been inspired from this side. During the first month 
after my arrival father never omitted to give me an 
account of the situation at home, and to urge me to be 
saving, because mother and he were only waiting for 
Paul's discharge from the army to follow me to New 
York. He suggested that I either put my money in 
the savings-bank, or purchase the steamer tickets one 
by one as funds accumulated. That, he felt, was the 
surest way to avoid temptations of extravagance. "Do 
not waste your resources," he advised once, "on silly 
things like jewelry. There will be time enough for 
luxuries later on. At present your only thought should 
be for the reunion of us all. I hope that we may be 
with you by Easter. Your mother is not likely to 
stand your absence very much longer." Then followed 
solicitous warnings against the pitfalls of the city: 
"Remember that the tavern-keeper loves the drunkard, 
but never gives him his daughter for a wife." 

116 



PURIFICATIONS 

Yet now, in spite of all my cheering prevarications, 
father suddenly adopted an entirely new tone. Times 
had unaccountably changed for the better in Vaslui. 
Grain was booming. He could find use for my services 
in various ways. It was a mistake, as he had felt from 
the start, to let me go away at all. He and mother 
were getting too old to undertake such a lengthy 
journey. Besides, Harry had got a new place in 
Constantza; he was virtually the head salesman, and 
he had it in his power to create a vacancy for me. 
Even Aunt Rebecca had repented of her unkindness. 
She now was not only willing to have me in Uncle 
Pincus's store, she was even ready to advance me the 
money for the return trip — if I needed any. 

I replied proudly that I wanted nobody's money or 
patronage. It was true, I wrote, that thus far I had 
not succeeded in saving a great deal, but that was 
because I could not yet speak English and had not 
learned a trade. Nevertheless, I was amply capable of 
taking care of myself. I was gradually making my 
way. America was exactly as Couza had pictured it. 
It was all right. They need not worry. 

In a consultation with my boyhood friend Yankel 
I confessed that I was tempted to accept the offers from 
home. I read him one of father's letters, and it made 
his eyes and his mouth water. "My! you are lucky," 
he exclaimed. His folks, too, it seemed, had divined 
that all was not well with him. But Monish was a 
stern father, and what he had written was something to 

117 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

this effect: "My dear son, you have wanted fun. 
Very well, be a man; stick where you are, and maybe 
you'll get it, after all. There is no milk and honey 
flowing here, either." 

Yankel thought there was. Distance co-operating 
with hunger cast a glowing spell over the past, and my 
friend, falling into reminiscence, summoned up a 
picture of home that set both our hearts aching. He 
was thinking only the other day, he said, how jolly it 
would be to be back in Vaslui at this very season, just 
for a little while. In this miserable New York one was 
losing track even of the calendar. Did I know that 
last week was the Feast of the Maccabees? How could 
any one know it in America? In a land where every day 
was some kind of a denatured holiday — where you 
could eat Sabbath twists on Wednesday, and matzoths 
on New- Year's — the holidays themselves became mean- 
ingless and dull. Besides, the little things that made 
the joy of a feast at home you could not get here at all. 
The bee's-wax tapers and the dredlach ("tops" made of 
metal), where were they? How, he wondered, would 
they keep Tabernacles in a tenement? Where was the 
yard to put up the structure? Where was the brook 
with the rushes growing on its banks to make the roof 
out of? And the Feast of Weeks, you could not 
celebrate that without fresh green twigs. There was 
no spring on Rivington Street. There was not even 
any real cow's cheese to make the prescribed pastries 
with. 

118 



PURIFICATIONS 

And now Purim was coming. Back there the boys 
who had not been such fools as to walk to America were 
getting the costumes ready to re-enact for the thousandth 
time the mask of Joseph and Pharaoh and the spectacle 
of Esther and Ahasuerus. Welvel Tseenes was prob- 
ably at that very moment climbing up into the garret 
and unearthing his mother's old purple wrapper, which 
in another week would be turned into the royal robe of 
the King of the Medes and the Persians; while the 
handy Yossel Beyles was undoubtedly neglecting his 
father's shop on the Ring and designing a cardboard 
sword for his majesty and a colored-paper head-dress 
for Esther the queen. Now that I was in exile, it would 
be interesting to know who was composing the words 
and coaching the performers. Every mother in town 
was now breaking walnuts by the thousand and crush- 
ing the kernels in the big brass mortar and making 
them into crisp strudels that crumble in your mouth. 
Whole jars of plum-butter are being emptied into a 
maple bowl and put in small dabs into the three-cornered 
Haman-pockets. And every youngster who is not too 
awkward to be intrusted with fine glassware will soon 
be going about delivering gifts of confectionery and 
red wine to his parents' relatives and friends, in accord- 
ance with the injunction contained at the end of the 
Book of Esther. 

Did I remember how last year he and I decided to 
depart from the traditional masques and to make the 
gang sit up and take notice by pulling off an entirely 

9 119 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

new stunt? How we stole into the parlor of his home 
and ransacked his eldest brother's cabinet until we 
found the two pistols that Judah always carried with 
him when he went about the country; and how I 
found difficulty in cocking the larger one, so that he 
tried it with all his might, and the trigger flew back 
with a deafening noise (happily all the windows were 
shut and no one heard it) and he thought he had shot 
me, and made a careful examination of my person, which 
resulted in the discovery that he had merely blown 
away half the left skirt of my new coat; and I had to 
go about the rest of that Saturday with my left hand in 
my breeches pocket to cover up the disaster, and that 
evening insisted on putting my Sabbath costume into 
the clothes-chest myself, and on the following Saturday 
raised an unblushing cry that the rats had got into my 
things. 

Four weeks after Purim was the Feast of Matzoths; 
and although this was only midwinter there must 
already be a Paschal note in the air of Vaslui. The 
fatted geese were being killed to furnish forth the 
shortening for the glorious rich puddings and the fat 
for the fried matzoths and the innumerable pancakes. 
He could almost see in his mind's eye the cheerful 
activity: Early in the morning his little brother was 
driving the team with the roan down to the butcher's, 
a dozen or so of the heavj^ snow-white birds lying with 
their feet tied in the back of the cart; as soon as he 
returned his mother and sisters flew into their aprons 

120 



PURIFICATIONS 

and proceeded to fill two separate sacks with feathers 
and down, which were to be turned later into cushions — • 
important additions to the girls' trousseaux; then the 
carcasses were dressed and hung in the chimney to be 
cured into pastrama; and for the rest of the month an 
unending succession of palatable goose-liver patties and 
dumplings created out of the driblets and giblets. 

Ah, that week before the Passover! Was there 
anything in America with all her wealth and freedom 
to match that? Particularly if one was a boy. Who 
could enumerate all its joys, even from this appalling 
distance? The busy hum of house-cleaning; the 
bringing in of the huge bale of crisp, new, unleavened 
cakes; the putting up of the all-year's dishes and the 
unpacking of the holiday dishes out of the box where 
they had remained since the last time; the rediscovery 
of half -forgotten pet cups and glasses; the cleansing 
with red-hot stones and scalding water of the silver- 
ware, a task always performed by the boys in a pit dug 
somewhere in the back yard; the shaking out of all 
pockets lest a crumb of leavened bread should inad- 
vertently undo an entire month's work; the last meal 
at noon on the day before the festive week, which must 
be eaten out of doors; the ceremonial sweeping away 
of the last traces of non-paschal food; and lastly the 
brief service at the temple attended only by father and 
sons, the welcoming by the women-folks dressed in 
spotless white; the very lengthy home service alter- 
nating with the courses of the banquet, the symbolism 

121 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

of the Four Questions, the Invitation to the Poor and 
Hungry, and the Glass for Ehjah — Yankel smacked his 
lips and sighed as he pictured it all. 

He found a romantic word even for the heathen 
customs of the peasantry, and discovered a hitherto 
unseen bright side in the very tyranny of the Rumanian 
Government. He recalled that we had just recently 
left behind the first of January, and reminded me of the 
huge ice cross which always appeared on that morning 
in the principal square of Vaslui, to which the peasants 
bowed and kneeled when they came in from the country 
while the regimental band played beautiful, solemn airs. 
The Christian Easter, if it did not come at the same 
time as the Passover, was almost like a feast of our own. 
To be sure, we were not allowed to eat the colored eggs, 
but we could still play "touch" with them; and as for 
the cake called cozonac no amount of prohibition 
sufficed to prevent us from sharing it with our young 
neighbors. Was not the search for the cross in the 
churchyards on the night before Easter a beautiful 
ceremony, after sd\? And the joyous ringing of bells 
when it was at last found by the priest who had hidden 
it.f^ And the Easter swing which even our mothers 
enjoyed riding in.f* He used to resent it bitterly when 
the police came and closed our private schools in mid- 
summer; but now as he looked back to it he could see 
that it was really a kindness, at least to us boys. It 
enabled us to enjoy the adventure of being taught 
secretly in his father's or my father's shed; and, what 

122 



PURIFICATIONS 

is more, the lessons had necessarily to be shortened, 
which gave us time to go swimming and to take the 
calf out to pasture. 

So Yankel advised me not to be a fool a second time 
and take a good thing when it was offered me. I was 
debating whether he was right, and asking myself 
whether, after living in the large world for a little time, 
I could again feel at home in a place which had no 
street cars, when suddenly — it was now the last week 
in January — my nightmare cleared and I got my first 
job. For that, thanks to Couza. Couza had hitherto 
shown no inclination to interest himself in my behalf, 
in spite of the fact that it was his preaching and example 
that had brought me to New York. When, however, 
word reached him of my purifications his heart was 
touched, and within a day or two he left word at my old 
Rivington Street address that he had found me a place 
in a barroom on Division Street. I have since that day 
received telegrams notifying me of university appoint- 
ments, and I have been very glad to get them, too, but 
no message of that kind has ever since struck me dumb 
with joy. The news of that first job, back in 1901, 
did. 



XI 

THE ETHICS OF THE BAR 

THEY took me. There were a number of regulation 
questions — about my family, how long I had been 
in America, what I had done before — and then Mr. and 
Mrs. Weiss exchanged an approving glance, and Mr. 
Weiss told me that I would do. He at once asked me 
to remove my coat and get into a white apron. Then 
he conducted me behind the beautiful oak counter — 
which I was soon to be informed was called a bar — and 
initiated me into the mysteries of the beer-taps. " Read 
this," he said, suddenly, and held up a bottle. "Fine! 
Did you say you have been here less than two months.'' " 
he asked, incredulously. I could see that I had made 
an impression, that he was getting more and more 
pleased with me. 

For my own part, I found the saloon a paradise, at 
least for a time. I got three meals every day and a 
clean bed every night, and three dollars a month, just 
like that, if you please, to do what I liked with. It was 
oppressive to have so much money. During the 
middle of the afternoon, after I got through washing 
the windows, and polishing the brass fittings, and 
preparing the free lunch, and there was nothing to do 

124 



THE ETHICS OF THE BAR 

but to wait for the evening trade, I would sit down at 
the far end of the bar next to the window and do 
intricate problems in fractions, in an effort to calculate 
by just how much my fortune had increased since the 
day before. Then the figures would puff and swell into 
fantastic sums as I went on to multiply them by five in 
order to obtain their equivalents in Rumanian francs 
and bani. You may laugh at this if you like, but it 
was I who had a new suit and new shoes and a derby 
hat when Easter came. The derby was my first, and 
it played queer tricks with my face ; but I was proud of 
it, all the same, because it made me look like a man. 

My employers, being a childless couple, in a manner 
adopted me and father-and-mothered me. Mrs. Weiss 
— "The Mrs.," as I was taught to call her — ^gave me 
some good clothes which her brother had cast off, and 
fed me on the choicest. In leisure moments she took 
occasion to continue my education by little hints on 
the importance of courtesy in America, on the most 
eft'ective style of dressing the hair for a young gentleman 
in my position, on the wisdom of thrift, and, in general, 
on how to pass from the green into the yellow state in 
the shortest possible time. 

Mr. Weiss, too, was kind and helpful, except when he 
was in his cups, which, fortunately, happened regularly 
on Saturday nights only, so that an observant young 
man need not be too much in the way when his master 
was irritable. From him I first learned that honesty, 
particularly with an employer, is the best policy, that 

125 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

bar-men never drink (except at a customer's invitation, 
which is another story and is governed by a special 
ethical rule), and that patience with a liberally spending 
customer, even when he says and does unpleasant 
things, is a virtue that is its own reward. He advised 
me to let him keep my wages for me instead of exposing 
them to the risks of pickpockets and loss, and assured 
me that I need not worry over the trifling sum in such 
well-to-do hands as his, and that I could have the whole 
amount owing to me at any time when I should need it 
or wish to quit his employ. He invariably paid my 
bath and hair-cutting bill out of his own pocket. On 
Sunday mornings he let me sleep until seven and opened 
the shop himself. He even offered me assistance in 
English, but of this I did not avail myself because I 
noticed that he always referred to Mrs. Weiss as "he," 

But I was an ungrateful soul, for I soon began to 
detect the flaws in my paradise. Just before the 
Passover my employer filled his windows with announce- 
ments to the effect that he had received a large stock of 
kosher liquids for the holiday, but shortly afterward the 
goods arrived from the distillery and I lent a hand in 
mixing them, and discovered to my horror that the 
chief ingredient was grain-alcohol, which was, ritually 
speaking, poison. Several times I was humiliated by a 
ridiculous fashion they had of testing my honesty, 
which consisted in leaving a quarter or half a dollar 
near my bed, and then watching the next day to see 
whether I would return it. The pair quarreled scandal- 

126 



THE ETHICS OF THE BAR 

ously and interminably; and when their squabbles 
began to degenerate into downright brawls, I hoped 
and prayed that I might find another job. 

The saloon also offered ample opportunity for an 
adolescent, impressionable youth to go to the dogs, and 
I had to hold on very tenaciously to my parents' trust 
in me to dodge them successfully. The "Family 
Entrance" admitted a constant stream of shady 
female characters to whose thirst I must minister, and 
who, if they had not inspired me with a physical 
repulsion, might have become a degrading temptation. 
The treating system was a more immediate danger. 
My employer constantly impressed it upon me that it 
was my duty to his firm to accept every treat that was 
offered me. It pleased the customer, he explained, and 
it increased the sales. But I had not yet learned to 
like beer — at home the commonalty drank wine and 
only the elegant rich indulged in beer — and I detested 
whisky. Therefore, when a certain German brick- 
layer foreman, who was running up a big bill in our place 
by treating every one in sight, insisted on my participat- 
ing in all his revels, I suggested to him one day that I 
would appreciate his generosity in some more solid 
form. He said, " All right," and reported my suggestion 
to Mr. Weiss. Thereupon followed a terrific fuss, in 
which Mrs. Weiss took sides with me, declaring, in the 
customer's face, that she would not allow any one to 
corrupt a young boy intrusted to her care by filling 
him with liquor that no one was paying for. I 

127 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

thought Mrs. Weiss was a brick, and told her so re- 
spectfully. 

And yet, for all its shortcomings and unpleasantness 
and dangers, I would not have you carry away the 
impression that the part played by the saloon in my 
evolution was merely harmful or negative. Quite the 
contrary. The lessons I learned while standing behind 
the bar or while pouring out miscellaneous drinks to the 
people at the card-tables have instilled into me more of 
the rich wisdom of life than I got out of all the labeled 
and classified knowledge imparted to me afterward in 
my three universities — and this is no dubious praise 
for the universities. For if a young fellow will go to 
perdition at the mere sight of evil, the probabilities are 
that there was not very much worth saving in him to 
begin with. But if he holds himself erect and comes 
through the mire unsoiled, I warrant ycu that he will 
prove the better for his experience. Many a man more 
fortunately surrounded (as the phrase goes) in his 
youth than I was has, in later life, sought to round out 
his knowledge of mankind and to deepen his sympathies 
by a voluntary descent into the maelstrom of the slums. 
I hope that such efforts are properly rewarded, but I 
confess to a mistrust in the efficacy of the method. The 
palpitating facts of life cannot, I am afraid, be got at 
through the resolves of middle age. Youth is the time 
for adventuring, and chance necessity is a better 
cicerone through the ins and outs and the ups and downs 
of existence than deliberate intent. What a young 

128 



THE ETHICS OF THE BAR 

man learns by hard knocks in his teens will quicken 
his senses and enrich his heart to better purpose than 
any amount of shrewd jottings in a slummer's note- 
book. 

A barroom — even an East Side barroom — is not, as 
some good people suppose, a mere hang-out for the 
indolent and the degenerate. It is, whether you like 
it or not, one of the central meeting-places of humanity. 
It is an institution where all the classes congregate in all 
their moods — the bestial and the generous, the morose 
and the convivial. Thither the laborer may escape 
from his shrewish wife when she makes his home 
unbearable; but thither also the merchant will resort 
with his customer when both are jovial over a particu- 
larly satisfactory bargain. A bum will shuffle in to 
dry his rags by the stove or to snatch a morsel from 
the free-lunch counter, and before departing will give 
you an invaluable glimpse into his sad history and his 
cheerful philosophy. The next moment a surgeon, 
returning from a successful operation, will toss you a 
quarter for a glass of vichy, and leave you gaping in 
idle wonderment at the incalculable wealth that a man 
who can so lightly do such a thing must have in reserve. 
At the noon-hour, a gang of workmen from a near-by 
"job" will trudge in in their heavy boots and grimy 
overalls to devour a plate of free soup and innumerable 
hunks of bread with their schooner of beer, and to teach 
you the wholesome moral that good digestion attends 
on honest toil. And if your mind is built to receive 

129 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

impressions, and if your heart is attuned to beat in 
harmony with other human hearts, your apprenticeship 
in a saloon will serve for as good a start toward a well- 
rounded education as you could desire. 

It was in the saloon — or, at least, in what I might 
call the extension department of it — that my eyes were 
first opened to the true meaning of American democracy 
and to my own opportunity in the midst of it. I should 
blush for my ingratitude if I did not, in recounting the 
influences that helped to make me an American, allude, 
at least en masse, to the hundreds of my nameless friends 
who assisted me forward in the general direction of my 
goal. In particular I must mention the wife of a 
physician in the Bronx to whom my employer one night 
sent me to deliver an order. She fell into conversation 
with me, and then, without warning, looked up at me 
and exclaimed: 

"Why, my dear boy, this is no occupation for you. 
You must look for something better." 

I ought to have been flattered, but in my confusion 
I could only pluck nervously at my cap: "It's all 
right. I like my work, and it pays fine." 

"Yes," she insisted, "but haven't you any higher 
ambition?" 

"Of course," I blurted out; "I want to be a doctor." 

"I thought so," she said, with satisfaction. "They 
all do. Well, you will be," she added, with the air of 
a divinity granting a mortal's wish, "I know. My hus- 
band was a poor immigrant boy once, and now he is a 

130 



THE ETHICS OF THE BAR 

doctor. Do you know why? Because he was ambi- 
tious and discontented." 

These were strange and inspiring words. Hitherto 
I had been piously following my parents' injunction to 
obey my master and to be thankful for whatever God 
gave me. I had not thought of discontent as a virtue. 
Now suddenly it dawned upon me that if I was ever 
to realize my father's dream I must follow a course 
directly opposed to the one he had outlined for me. As 
I looked about me I became aware that discontent 
with fortune's favors was the order of life and the rule 
of progress. On the East Side, I observed, there were 
no classes. Men were engaged in given lines of work 
or business. But their occupations were not permanent 
things. They did not chain them down to any definite 
place in the scheme of existence. What a man did in 
no way determined his worth or circumscribed his 
ambitions. Peddling and hawking and the sewing- 
machine were just so many rungs in the ladder. A 
dingy apartment in the tenement was merely a stage in 
the march toward a home in Brownsville or a shop in 
the Bronx. The earth was young and fresh from the 
hand of the Maker, and as yet undivided among His 
children. That was another distinctive superiority of 
America over Rumania. 

From that night on my hope to get into other work 
turned into determination, and at Easter an incident 
occurred which promised to open the way. In the three 
months that I had been in the saloon I had never had 

131 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

a day to myself. I had been too well contented to ask 
for it. But when my new clothes came I must go and 
show them to my friends. Mrs. Weiss thought so, 
too; and between us we persuaded Mr. Weiss to let me 
off for the afternoon and evening of Easter Day. 
Among the relatives and friends whom I visited that 
day I met a cousin of mine who worked at shirts as a 
collar-maker. He opened my eyes to the lay of things. 
Here I was working day and night for three dollars a 
month, while he was earning six and often seven dollars 
in a single week, and he had his evenings to go to the 
Rumanian restaurants and tea-houses. I wondered 
whether I could become a shirt-maker. My cousin 
thought so, and promised to watch for an opening. 

I passed a restless and discontented month before 
my opportunity came. Then a firm on Walker Street 
offered to teach me sleeving, on condition that I work 
for two weeks without pay. I had a month's wages 
coming to me, so I felt that I could manage it; but when 
I timidly announced my purpose to IVIr. Weiss — in my 
excitement I forgot that it was the fateful Saturday 
night— he flew off the handle and refused to pay up. 
Even Mrs. Weiss was against me this time. She 
declared me a fool for leaving a good home to go to the 
sweat-shop (the very argument I have since employed 
with domestic servants), and revealed an ambition she 
had been cherishing for some time of setting me up in 
a saloon of my own when I had become sufficiently 
Americanized. She prophesied that if I did not come 

132 



THE ETHICS OF THE BAR 

to my senses at the very first sight of a shop, I would 
never leave it at all. "Once an operator always an 
operator," she reminded me. Grocers' assistants worked 
their way up to grocery-stores, tap-boys became saloon- 
keepers, peddlers and clerks attained to businesses of 
their own, but a sweat-shop hand contracted consump- 
tion or socialism and never rose to anything better. 
The operative's lean years always swallowed up his fat 
ones. As long as I worked I might earn a httle more than 
I was getting in the saloon — still, she was ready to give 
me a raise — but I would find saving quite impossible once 
I began to pay for every little thing out of my own pocket ; 
and when the " slack " came I would starve as thoroughly 
as ever I did when I was a greenhorn and before she saved 
my life by taking me off the streets. No doubt I had for- 
gotten those miserable days, now that prosperity had 
come to me through her; but she remembered very 
distinctly that first day when I gluttonously de- 
voured potatoes like cheese dainties, and she was 
ashamed to let customers see me until she had found 
me some clothes. 

My benefactor, Couza, happening to drop in, as he 
often did, Mr. and Mrs. Weiss at once appealed the 
case to him. Whereupon he settled himself into a chair 
by one of the tables and, while sipping a schooner of 
beer, proceeded to give me a sound lecture on my 
unethical conduct. My ingratitude to my employers 
and to him, he found, was simply monstrous. I ought 
to be ashamed for even asking them to pay me after the 

133 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

return I was making them for their parental kindness. 
Was I aware that the very clothes I was wearing were 
theirs, and that they had tried to educate me into an 
American and a business man? As for the sweat-shop, 
he would not even discuss that. He could only think 
pityingly of my poor father and mother. They were 
decent, respectable people. If they had known that 
their favorite little son, on whom they were placing 
such high hopes, would ally himself with the outcast, 
the vulgar, the unambitious, the ungodly, they would 
never have consented to my emigration. And if they 
were to hear of it now — as they were certainly going to — 
it would break their hearts and they would disown me. 

Heaven alone knows what they hoped to achieve by 
all this grilling, unless it was to do violence to my 
feelings, in which case they succeeded amply. But as 
far as gaining any result for themselves was concerned 
it could do no possible good. A month ago a raise of 
a dollar might have made me hesitate and consider. 
But now I had bettered Couza's own instruction. I 
had found the America he had seen in a dream. Even 
shirt-making with all its promise of freedom and money 
was but a stepping-stone. I was looking away beyond 
to my destiny dawning on the horizon — the golden 
destiny of my childhood. I had heard the tap of 
Opportunity on my door, and I was hurrying to answer 
the call. 



PART III 
THE EDUCATION OF AN AMERICAN 



XII 

SHIRTS AND PHILOSOPHY 

ON the whole, I take it, the foreign colony in our 
larger cities is a little unfavorably regarded by the 
conventional enthusiasts for Americanization. These 
kindly ladies and gentlemen appear to assume that the 
trick of turning American is some kind of an affair of a 
rubber stamp and an oath of allegiance and bath-tubs. 
It is quite simple. You go down there, to the East 
Side, or Little Italy, or Little Poland, and you establish 
a settlement and deliver lectures and furnish them a 
pointed example, and behold! the fog lifts, and before 
your eyes stands the new-born American. The sooner 
this effective performance is accomplished the better, 
for it is quite clear that the immigrant invariably hails 
from an inferior world, with queer notions about 
manners and the use of soap and fresh air and constitu- 
tions, and if he is long left to himself and his fellows he 
will settle down to this pestiferous imported life of his 
and never become one of us at all. He will become a 
confirmed alien, a dangerous, disruptive element. 

Into this complacent view the patent fact that 
Americanism is a compromise does not enter. It is 

137 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

quite overlooked that the adoptive American has always 
been and will always remain a composite American. 
My good friends are unwilling to see that the alien has 
as much to teach as to learn, that his readjustment is 
inevitably a matter of give and take, and that he only 
begins to feel at home in this new country when he has 
succeeded in blending his own culture and ideas and 
mode of life with those of the people that came here 
before him. Your self-complacent native takes stock 
of the Americanized alien and cries, delightedly, "See 
how America has changed him!" But I suppose he 
would be greatly astonished if the immigrant were to 
answer, with equal truth, "Look how I have changed 
America!" Americans can nowise be persuaded that, 
if there is to be any readjustment, it must come from 
this sort of mutual reaction; and they will simply 
laugh at you if you tell them that the foreign colony, 
far from being a danger, is about the only natural agency 
by which the process can be effected. 

Now, if places like the East Side are looked at 
askance, how very little justice could one expect toward 
the institution of the sweat-shop .^^ That, surely, is a 
veritable hotbed of un- Americanism. When my native 
friends, who never weary of the topic, ask me what 
influences I account as the most vital in making an 
American of me, and when, in a sincere endeavor to be 
enlightening, I answer them that it is a toss-up between 
the college and the sweat-shop, they smile and say that 
I am making paradoxes. Of course, they admit, in a 

138 



SHIRTS AND PHILOSOPHY 

negative kind of way, the slums may perhaps arouse a 
craving for a broader and a fuller life, just as imprison- 
ment develops a passionate love of freedom, or as a 
crabbed, bigoted religious parent may drive a youngster 
to atheism. But how such a place can possibly foster 
any idealism in a direct way, or itself become a bridge 
between ignorance and intelligence, between slavery and 
independence, in short between culture and stagna- 
tion, is more than they can understand. They think 
of the sweat-shop as all dark and poverty-ridden and 
brutalized. 

The East Side itself, I may add — or, at any rate, the 
forward-looking, practical layer of it — holds no ex- 
aggerated opinion about the sewing-machine and the 
flat-iron, as Mrs. Weiss's convictions on the subject 
may serve to prove. Little Rumania, indeed, as a 
civilization, entertained an instinctive aversion to the 
industrial life. My former employers and their dis- 
tinguished patron, the big-hearted Couza, whatever 
their ulterior motives might be in attempting to deter 
me from my course, really spoke from the depths of 
their souls when they denounced the sweat-shop. 
Almost everybody I knew warned me against it. Even 
my erstwhile landlady, Mrs. Segal, declared that she had 
never approved of Cousin Aby's collar-making, in spite 
of the fact that he came from the lesser branch of the 
family and had never received the fine schooling and 
home-training that we of the Vaslui clan had (Aby be- 
ing a native of Galatz). What, she asked me, would 

139 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

become of our splendid tradition as a family of 
merchants and professional men if we drifted one by 
one into the classes that worked with their hands? I 
could not answer that diflScult question, but I reminded 
her that she herself had once long ago taught me that 
in America there was no such thing as high and low, 
and no shame in doing anything. Besides, her own 
daughters were earning their living at neckwear. 
Whereupon she invited my attention to the subtle fact 
that neckties were not shirts, and that I was now no 
longer a greenhorn, which altered the case entirely. 
But it was all right. I could go to the shop if I was 
determined to, and see for myself. 

Well, I confess that there was more than a grain of 
truth in these gloomy predictions. The very walk 
to the shop that early morning with Cousin Aby, 
the collar-maker, was a depressing adventure. We 
were a little late, and I was being properly berated, 
as we hurried along, for my unindustrial habits. Canal 
Street west of the Bowery, with its cobblestones and 
clattering trucks, its bare, ugly sides and trudging 
throngs of unkempt men and girls, was not half so 
friendly as at its eastern extremity. And as we swung 
past Broadway and into Walker Street, the dreariness 
became almost intolerable. Here the thoroughfare was 
too cramped for normal traffic, and the stunted, grimy 
buildings seemed ludicrously undersized for their heavy 
tasks. All the same, the little alley was choked up with 
one-horse carts, its sidewalks were littered with bales 

140 



SHIRTS AND PHILOSOPHY 

of unmade clothing, a pandemonium of rasping curses 
from drivers and half-awake, haK-grown men with 
aprons, staggering under immense burdens, overtopped 
the rattling and the clanging from Broadway beyond. 

And then we felt our way up two creaking flights of 
stairs, and my cousin opened a door, and we entered. 
We proceeded to the right toward an elongated counter, 
where I was introduced to the boss; my cousin removed 
his coat and collar, and disappeared into the wilderness 
beyond. I followed him with my eyes, and the sight 
did not cheer me. There were three endless tables 
running almost through the entire length of the loft 
in parallel lines. Each table was dotted with a row of 
machines, and in front of these sat the operatives like 
prisoners chained to their posts. Men and women 
they were, collarless, disheveled, bent into irregular 
curves; palpitating, twitching, as if they were so 
many pistons and levers in some huge, monstrous 
engine. On the nearer end, around a smaller square 
table, stood an old, white-bearded man, a young girl, 
and a boy, marking shirts with a pencil, pulling threads, 
folding, "finishing." The intermittent whirring of 
wheels, the gasping and sucking of the power-engine 
(somewhere out of sight), the dull murmur of voices, 
heightened the oppressive effect. 

My first lesson, administered by a frowsy little man 
in shirt-sleeves and no collar, with his suspenders dan- 
gling loosely at his sides, was very bewildering. I had 
thought that I was to learn how to make shirts; but 

141 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

now my instructor informed me with a smile that that 
would be a rather large order. No, I was to play only 
a very small part in the great performance. I was to 
be a sleever; and sleeving, it appeared, was as much as 
any one man could desire, for it involved a whole chain 
of skilful and delicate operations. The shirts were 
brought to you in two bundles, which you proceeded to 
place, each bundle in a separate box, one situated on 
the right side and the other on the left side of your 
machine. Then you suddenly discovered — sometimes 
a bit too late — that the bundles contained textiles of 
several designs and shades of color, and that you were 
expected to sew no green sleeves into brown shirts. 
The machine was of a kind that I had not even suspected 
to exist. It had two needles, and that implied two 
spools and two threadings and two bobbins. Just in 
front of the needles was an odd device called a *'hem- 
mer" which was designed to facilitate the work. But 
the whole contraption had a way of running away with 
you as soon as you pressed the power pedal, so that the 
material got twisted and bunched up in the hemmer, 
and usually broke both needles at once, and sometimes 
lodged one of them in your thumb, and invariably, at 
the least, tangled up the thread into a hopeless mess. 

I sewed and ripped and sewed again for two weeks 
without pay, and I am afraid that the proceeds of my 
toil made but a poor return for the boss's patience and 
instruction. But if the bargain was unprofitable for 
him, it was well-nigh ruinous to me. My former 

142 



SHIRTS AND PHILOSOPHY 

employers having declined (out of pure benevolence) 
to pay me the month's wages they owed me, my great 
problem was to survive the period of my apprentice- 
ship. I had borrowed an amount equivalent to that 
reserve I had been counting on, and Mrs. Bernfeld, 
with whom I had taken up residence on Eldridge Street, 
was kind enough to let me pay her rent at the end of 
the month instead of in advance. But with all my 
skimping and economizing it was impossible to make 
three dollars last very much longer than two weeks. 
I had miscalculated somewhat. I had figured on 
getting some money when my instruction was over, 
forgetting entirely that while everything else had to be 
paid for as I went or beforehand, labor received its 
rewards only after it was done. I got nothing even 
when I had completed a week as a piece-worker. Pay- 
day was once in a fortnight, and I was in the shop for 
a month before my first envelope came around; and 
then I discovered that although I had sleeved a hundred 
and sixty dozens of shirts, which, at the rate of four 
cents per dozen, ought to have entitled me to very 
nearly six dollars and a half, my envelope contained 
only three dollars. One week's wages, it developed, 
was regularly held back. They said it was because it 
took that long to audit the accounts. But that was a 
euphemism. The truth was that that week's wages of 
the forty hands constituted the major part of the firm's 
operating capital. 

For all that, I soon found myself very happy in my 

143 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

new surroundings. Those novelists and sentimental- 
ists who slander the sweat-shop and the tenement 
should take notice. We certainly had a very much 
more human time of it in the old days than we did 
later on in the high-ceilinged, many-windowed, electric- 
fanned, palatial prisons that conformed to the factory 
laws. The reasons were these: In the sweat-shop the 
hand and the boss belonged to the same class. That 
made a big difference. There were no spying "fore- 
ladies" and no rules, no peremptory calls to the oflSce 
and no threats of discharge. You did not have to 
stand in line with hat in hand for the wages of your 
toil. If we were hard up after a long, slack season, we 
could get all our meals on credit from the old shop- 
peddler, who sold baked liver by the slice, brandy, 
bananas, and rolls, and sometimes lent us even a bit 
of cash. The number of workers was small, so that 
everybody knew everybody else. During the lunch- 
hour we visited, and fell into violent arguments about 
the labor movement and socialism and literature, and 
mocked good-naturedly at the "capitalist" when he 
ventured to put in a word (as he always did) ; and each 
of us, except the girls, took his turn in going for the 
can of beer. All this tended to preserve the human 
dignity and the self-respect of the worker. 

In spite of the fact that my firm was specializing in 
the stiff black-and-white article intended for the 
Southern negro, my earnings kept gradually rising, 
until (with the standards of barroom wages still in 

144 



SHIRTS AND PHILOSOPHY 

my mind) they attained dizzying heights. With softer 
materials, to be sure, I might have turned out more 
dozens per day, but I comforted myself with the 
thought that the work would be more "particular," so 
that the net results would probably be about the same. 
The "slack," indeed, was longer and more thorough- 
going than at the better lines. For the two whole 
months of January and February that temperamental 
gentleman in the South seemed to be dispensing with 
shirts. But while that meant going into debt and 
cutting down on luxuries, there were compensating 
circumstances even then, as we shall see. While work 
was rushing I got in touch with the instalment peddler 
and bought a solid-gold watch and chain on the basis 
of a dollar per week, and once in an access of extreme 
thriftiness I went the length of starting a savings 
account with the Bowery Bank, which, however, never 
went beyond the first deposit, for one thing because my 
fellow- workers got wind of the fact and poked fun at me 
and called me capitalist, and secondly because the 
slack fell upon us suddenly that year and I was forced 
to liquidate and the cashier told me in a coldly 
impersonal way that my patronage would not be desired 
again. The jewelry, on the other hand, was as good 
as a solid estate and much better than money in the 
bank, because at a pinch it was not necessary to wait 
thirty days to cash in. All I had to do was to take the 
things to "the uncle," or, as you would call it, the pawn- 
shop, and get thirty dollars all at once, which sufficed 

145 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

to keep the peddler pacified with regular payments as 
well as to make me comfortable until prosperity was 
mine again. There was no denying that, for all its 
good things to eat and drink, and its lazy afternoon 
hours, and educational opportunities, the saloon could 
not hold a candle to the two-needle machine. 

Indeed, the sweat-shop was for me the cradle of 
liberty. It was more — it was my first university. I 
was not long there before I discovered that there were 
better things I could do with my free evenings than to 
frequent the cozy hang-outs of my fellow-countrymen. 
When I overheard a dispute between the young 
buttonhole-maker and the cadaverous, curly-haired 
closer, on the respective merits of the stories of Tchekhov 
and Maupassant; and when, another day, the little 
black-eyed Russian girl who was receiving two cents 
per dozen shirts as a finisher boldly asserted that 
evolution pointed the way to anarchism and not to 
socialism, and cited the fact that Spencer himself was 
an anarchist, my eyes were opened and I felt ashamed 
of my ignorance. I had been rather inclined hitherto 
to feel superior to my surroundings, and to regard the 
shop and the whole East Side as but a temporary halt 
in my progress. With my career looming on the 
horizon, and my inherited tendency to look down upon 
mechanical trades, I had at first barely given a tolerant 
eye to the sordid men and girls who worked beside me. 
I had not realized that this grimy, toil-worn, airless 
Ghetto had a soul and a mind under its shabby exterior. 

146 



SHIRTS AND PHILOSOPHY 

It knew everything and talked about everything. 
Nothing in the way of thought-interest was too big 
or too heavy for this intelligenzia of the slums. 

I made an effort to listen attentively in the hope that 
I might get some hint as to where my fellow-operatives 
got all their knowledge. I observed that nearly all of 
them brought books with them to work — Yiddish, 
Russian, German, and even English books. During 
the lunch-hour, if the disputatious mood was not on 
them, the entire lot of them had their heads buried in 
their volumes or their papers, so that the littered, 
unswept loft had the air of having been miraculously 
turned into a library. While waiting for my next 
bundle of shirts, or just before leaving the shop, I 
would stealthily glance at a title, or open a pamphlet 
and snatch a word or two. I was too timid to inquire 
openly. Once a girl caught me by the wardrobe 
examining her book, and asked me whether I liked books 
and whether I went to the lectures. I became confused 
and murmured a negative. "You know," she said, 
"Gorky is going to speak to-night," and held out a 
newspaper to show me the announcement. 

So they were going to lectures! I began to buy 
newspapers and watch for the notices. I took to 
reading books and attending meetings and theaters. 
There were scores of lectures every week, I found, and 
I went to as many as I could. One night it was Dar- 
win, and the next it might be the principles of air- 
pressure. On a Saturday night there were sometimes 

147 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

two meetings so arranged that both could be attended 
by the same audience. I remember going once to a 
meeting at Cooper Union to protest against the use of 
the militia in breaking a strike somewhere in the West, 
and then retiring with a crowd of others to the anarchist 
reading-room on Eldridge Street to hear an informal 
discussion on "Hamlet versus Don Quixote." It did 
not matter to us what the subject was. There was a 
peculiar, intoxicating joy in just sitting there and drink- 
ing in the words of the speakers, which to us were 
echoes from a higher world than ours. Quite likely 
most of us could not have passed an examination in 
any of the subjects we heard discussed. It was some- 
thing more valuable than information that we were 
after. Our poor, cramped souls were yearning to be 
inspired and uplifted. Never in all my experience 
since, though I have been in colleges and learned 
societies, have I seen such earnest, responsive audiences 
as were those collarless men and hatless girls of the 
sweat-shops. 

The East Side theater was another educational 
institution. It was seldom that an attempt was made 
to entertain us there, and whenever it was made we 
expressed our resentment by hooting. We did not go 
to the theater for amusement any more than we read 
books or listened to lectures for amusement. It was 
art and the truthful representation of actual life and 
the element of culture that we demanded, and the 
playwrights who satisfied us we rewarded by our 

148 



SHIRTS AND PHILOSOPHY 

homage and our devotion. No American dramatist 
was ever worshiped by his public as Jacob Gordin was. 
I remember that when a reactionary newspaper tried 
to stab him in the back by raising a cry of immorahty 
against one of his plays, the whole progressive element 
in the Ghetto came as a unit to his support by packing 
his theater and clamoring for his appearance. The 
sheet that dared attack him was nearly boycotted out 
of existence. And when, some years later, Gordin died, 
every shop was closed on the East Side and a hundred 
thousand followed his hearse in genuine mourning. 
There is no parallel, I think, in the whole history of the 
American drama to this testimonial of popular devotion 
to an intellectual leader. 

Nor was Gordin the only divinity on our dramatic 
Olympus. There were younger men like Libin and 
Kobrin, who, while they might be said to have been 
members of Gordin's realistic school, had made some 
interesting departures in subject-matter by laying 
emphasis on the humor and pathos of life in the New 
World as affecting the immigrant. These two had for 
a long time been principally occupied with fiction, but 
had turned to the stage because of the greater educa- 
tional possibilities of the drama. The Russians, too, 
kept in touch with their exiled brethren and saw to it 
that our souls did not starve for lack of spiritual 
sustenance. Not only did the Canal Street publishers 
bring out the beautiful humorous tales of Sholom 
Aleichem and Mendele Mocher Sforim and the poetry 

149 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

of Frug and Peretz, several amateur organizations — 
precursors of the numerous "advanced" playhouses 
now fashionable everywhere — were formed for the 
purpose of producing the poetic dramas of Hirshbein 
and Peretz and the symbolic plays of Asch and Pin sky > 
which, owing to their extreme literary character, were 
not adapted to the regular theaters. Notably the 
Progressive Dramatic Club conducted readings and 
performances of choice tragedies "from home," which, 
although they were intended for the elect, were attended 
by as large audiences as ever went to the Thalia and 
People's theaters. 

I saw more good literature on the stage in those days 
while I was sewing sleeves into shirts than I saw in all 
my subsequent career. When the original playwrights 
could not fill the demand, the lack was supplied by the 
translators. While Broadway was giving Ibsen the 
cold shoulder, the East Side was acclaiming him with 
wild enthusiasm. I saw "Monna Vanna" on the 
Bowery before the Broadway type of theater-goer had 
ever heard the name of Maeterlinck. Many foreign 
writers — Hauptmann, Sudermann, Gorky, Andreiyev, 
Tolstoy — had their premieres in the Ghetto. The 
same was true of actors; I saw Nazimova in "Ghosts" 
before she could speak English. And I made my first 
acquaintance with Greek tragedy when I had not yet 
learned how to speak English. 



XIII 

THE SOUL OF THE GHETTO 

I DID not for a long time perceive tlie drift of all this 
feverish intellectual activity. I was too busy reading 
and listening to care about the ultimate purpose of it 
all. Gordin was giving his brilliant talks on the 
Evolution of the Drama, and running a series of sug- 
gestive articles on the topic in Die Zukunft. A group 
of young writers had just begun the publication of 
Die Freie Stunde (The Idle Hour), which was devoted 
only to what was best in belles-lettres. The war 
between the radical and the reactionary press, always 
raging, was just now assuming a most violent character. 
The anarchist Freie Arbeiter Stimme was bringing out 
the journal of a Catholic priest who had attained to 
atheism, and publishing column upon column of letters 
in which the merits of religion and free-thought were 
discussed by the public, a certain well-known agnostic 
taking up the defense of religion for argument's sake. 
Within the progressive circle there were continual 
debates between socialists and anarchists, which some- 
times rose to passionate fury, but always remained 
enlightening. My mind was eagerly absorbing all these 
new impressions and all these wonderful ideas. A new 

n 151 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

world was unfolding itself before me, with endless, 
magnificent vistas extending in all directions. 

The "slack," that bugbear of the factory hand, was 
losing its terror for me. A time arrived when I would 
start to the shop in the morning in hopes that I might 
find the power turned off and the boss explaining that 
work was "slow." On such days I would keep my coat 
and collar right on and take myself off to the nearest 
library, despite the boss's protests and assurance that 
he was expecting the bundles from the manufacturer to 
arrive any moment. There was so much for me to do. 
There were whole stacks of Norwegian dramatists, and 
Russian novelists, and Yiddish poets that I had as yet 
barely touched. In my room there was a collection of 
the Reclam editions of Zola and Maupassant, and an 
assortment of plays of all nations which had been 
suggested to me by Gordin's lectures which I had not 
yet found time to touch at all. Besides, I was trying 
to become a writer myself. The Forward had accepted 
and published some aphorisms of mine under the pen- 
name of "Max the Sleever," which my friends at the 
shop had greatly admired. I was devoting whole nights 
to a novel in the manner of The Kreutzer Sonata. Above 
all, I delighted in lingering outside the literary coffee- 
houses on Canal Street, where every now and then I 
would catch a glimpse of Gordin and his circle. 

With my mind so busy, then, it was not surprising 
that I should remain somewhat indifferent to what was 
going on in my soul. My ancient religion had, under 

152 



THE SOUL OF THE GHETTO 

American skies, vanished long ago; but I was scarcely 
aware that a burning new faith had taken its place 
with me, as it had done with thousands of others. I 
cannot now say whether I was taking it for granted or 
did not know it. I continually heard people in the 
shop, and in the quarter generally, referred to as 
"clodpates" and "intelligents," and I knew that an 
intelligent was a person who went to lectures and read 
books, and preferred tragedy to vaudeville, and looked 
upon America as a place which afforded one an oppor- 
tunity to acquire and express ideas, while a clodpate 
cared more for dollars than for ideas, and worked hard 
so that some day he might have others work for him, 
and in the evening he went to a dance-hall or to the 
Atlantic Garden or to Miner's or to a card-party, and 
kept himself scrupulously respectable so that some day, 
when he could afford it, he might rise to be the presi- 
dent of the synagogue or the lodge, and read (when he 
read at all) the Tageblatt and the joke-books. All this 
I knew, and, in addition, that I was already being classed 
as an intelligent among the hands at the shop. 

It never occurred to me, however, to attach any 
ulterior meaning to the word. It was obvious enough; 
I could have seen it if I had only looked. But somehow 
I did not look — until one day the thing struck me and 
I had to look. It was an idle day at the shop. The 
boss had persuaded us to wait for the work, and we 
were lounging about on the machine-tables and on the 
ends of cases. Some of us had been to a reading of 

1^3 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

Ibsen's symbolic drama, "When We Dead Awaken," 
the night before, and were, of course, discussing it. I 
said that I hked it. Then the girl who had the year 
before put me on the intellectual track spoke up and 
asked me, in a tone of pained astonishment: 
"Why, aren't you a radical?" 

"Yes, of course," I said, a little uncertainly. "Who 
is not?" 

"Who is not? The clodpates are not." 
"But what has this got to do with literature?" 
"Well," she answered, "it has this to do with it. 
This symbolism business is reactionary. It has always 
been. It's churchy." 

Then I suddenly realized that everybody I knew was 
either a socialist or an anarchist. It came to me in a 
flash that this social idealism was the soul that stirred 
within everything that was going on about and within 
me. I remembered that all our meetings and lectures 
were colored by it. And I understood that every 
intelligent was an atheist partly because every clod- 
pate was a believer and partly because the established 
creeds were cluttering the road to social and spiritual 
progress. When I asked myself why we studied the 
abstruse principles of physics, the answer was that it 
helped us to disprove the arguments of the religious. 
Our enthusiasm for evolution, I saw, was due to that 
doctrine's implied denial of the biblical story of creation. 
And if we loved the poets, it was because they seemed to 
us to be pervaded by a lofty discontent with the existing 

154 



THE SOUL OF THE GHETTO 

order of things. In short, I perceived that we were 
moved by a very vital rehgion of our own; although, 
of course, we would have scorned to call it by that 
hated name. 

I imagine that one of the things that had misled me 
was the absence of every trace of sect exclusiveness in 
the movement, at least on its intellectual side. Bitter 
as we were against the ruling class, we took no exception 
to its books. In our little radical libraries Burke 
rubbed elbows with Rousseau and the works of the 
imperialist Kipling touched sides with those of the 
revolutionary Ivropotkin. Some of our leaders were as 
assiduously translating Machiavelli as Oscar Wilde. 
At Warschauer's Russian tea-house — the principal 
labor resort — I often heard Bacon mentioned respect- 
fully as a philosopher alongside of Spencer. Of course, 
it was hard for us to see how a man who had the mental 
and emotional equipment of a great author could be 
blind to the justice of our cause, and we naturally did 
favor the insurgent writers. But art is art, we held, 
and the value of a good book is not changed by the fact 
that its author is wrong about the rights of women or 
the referendum. The only kind of writing we scorned 
was the stupid and the fraudulent. Toward genuine 
literature we were as friendly as the medieval monks 
who saved the literary treasures of paganism from 
destruction. 

Yes, our radicalism had all the nobility and all the 
weaknesses of a young faith. We were no mere parlor 

155 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

socialists, we toilers of the slums. Our atheism was no 
affectation; our anarchism was not a fad to make 
conversation with over the tea-cups. Nor were we 
concerned with the improvement of our own material 
condition merely. We were engaged in the regeneration 
of society, and we were prepared to take up arms in the 
great social revolution which we saw daily drawing 
nearer. We were all missionaries, and some of us were 
quite genuine bigots. On the Day of Atonement, when 
all the conservative people of the quarter fasted and 
repented and knelt in prayer, we ostentatiously went 
about with big cigars in our mouths and bags of food 
in our pockets; and in the afternoon we met in the 
public square and marched off in a body with flags and 
trumpets to the atheist picnic somewhere in Brooklyn. 
Similarly, during the Passover, we gave an entertain- 
ment and ball, where we consumed more forbidden 
food and drink than was good for us. No doubt this 
was foolish — perhaps it was even vulgar — but to us it 
was propaganda for our faith among the unconverted. 

I recall a lean devotee I used to see at the anarchist 
meetings. He never missed one, and he never failed 
to occupy a seat right in front of the speaker's stand. 
During the address he would lean forward and glue his 
eyes on the speaker, as if he were determined that not 
a word should escape him. And then, somehow, it 
appeared that he always did miss something very 
essential, after all. When the floor was thrown open 
for general discussion he was invariably the first to 

156 



THE SOUL OF THE GHETTO 

arise. Whereupon he would begin with, " Thinkers and 
comrades," and proceed to make a few irrelevant re- 
marks which showed at once that he had understood 
nothing at all of the lecture. Some of the audience 
would smile at him and some would murmur impatiently 
until he would grow confused and sink back into his 
seat. But these ignominious exhibitions never pre- 
vented him from heading each contribution list with 
some extravagant sum. Occasionally I would run 
across him at a little restaurant in the rear of a saloon 
on Eldridge Street, where one could get a tolerable 
meal for thirteen cents, and it puzzled me to reconcile 
that open-handedness at the meetings with this skimp- 
ing on food. I understood it only when I became a 
devotee myself. 

I have often since looked back with a melancholy 
regret to those splendid days, and have tried to recon- 
struct them in my memory and to find a parallel for 
them somewhere. From this distance they seem to me 
comparable to nothing else so much as to those early 
times when Christianity was still the faith of the 
despised and the lowly. There was in us that apostolic 
simplicity of speech and manners, that disregard of 
externals, that contempt of the world and its prizes, 
that hatred of shams, that love of the essential, that 
intolerance for the unbeliever, which only they who feed 
on a living ideal can know. In our social relations it 
was the sincere intention, the rigid adherence to the 
truth as we saw it, that counted. In an argument it 

157 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

was your duty to be frank and honest; if your opponent 
was offended, so much the worse for him. You could 
come to a meeting, to a play, or to a gathering in the 
house of a friend in your working clothes and unshaven 
if you chose. The man and not the costume was the 
thing. A woman was but a human being in petticoats; 
therefore if you happened to want company at War- 
schauer's, or felt the need of giving play to your 
opinions at the theater, you need not hesitate to address 
the first girl that came your way; therefore, also, you 
need not spare her in a battle of ideas; but therefore, 
also, you need not expect to be looked up to as a superior 
creature with a whole chain of exploded privileges and 
immunities. She was in every way your human equal 
and counterpart, whatever the animal differences 
between you might be. Your business in life was to 
labor for the things that you devoured, to cultivate your 
mind, and to serve the ideals of your class. Beside 
these, the sordid concerns of the bodily existence were 
a secondary matter. Wherefore the American heathen 
with his wealth and his show, his worldliness and his 
materialism and his sporting page, was an object 
worthy of your profoundest contempt. 

What else could it be, if it was not this ancient dream 
of the prophets revitalized and recast into a modern 
mold, that had the magic power to transfigure the 
rotting slums into an oasis of spiritual luxuriance, and 
the gloomy, dust-laden factory into a house of light 
and hope? The mere human thirst for knowledge, the 

158 



THE SOUL OF THE GHETTO 

purely selfish craving for personal advancement, is 
hardly strong enough to have made us sit up night after 
night and listen to abstract discussions about monkeys 
and men or the basis of religious belief, when our worn- 
out bodies were eminently entitled to rest and light 
entertainment. And surely nothing but this attach- 
ment to the uplifting promise of a noble future for 
mankind, this devotion to something outside of our 
unwashed selves and above our grimy surroundings, 
could have rendered us so heartlessly indifferent to the 
bleeding hearts of our poor bewildered elders. How the 
wretched graybeards and peruqued grandmothers 
suffered at the disaffection of their young! For even 
in the most advanced households it was a rare thing if 
the two generations were in spiritual accord; and in 
the greater part of them clodpate and intelligent dined 
at the same table and clashed continually — the parents 
enduring violent agonies over the children's disloyalty 
to the ancient faith, their sacrilegious mockery of the 
Law and its practices, their adherence to an abhorred 
creed, their oblivion to the ambitions that father and 
mother had so long entertained for them; while the 
youth thought of nothing but the progress of the cause 
and flaunted the red flag in the faces of their beloved 
parents in the hope of convincing them of its honesty 
by the simple device of getting them used to it. It 
needed just that element of tragedy to add to East 
Side radicalism the cup of martyrdom without which no 
religion is quite genuine. 

159 



XIV 

THE TRAGEDY OF READJUSTMENT 

I MYSELF was in the meantime moving in two sepa- 
rate worlds. Nominally, at least, my home was still 
in Little Rumania among my own respectable rela- 
tives from Vaslui. Time and again I resolved to find a 
lodging somewhere south of Grand Street, where the 
majority of my comrades in spirit lived and where all my 
interests lay. But I never did it. Of friction there was 
enough between us. They were very outspoken, were 
my kinsfolk, in their disapproval of me. They found 
fault with my impiety, my socialism (or anarchism — 
they did not know just which it was), my indijBFerence 
to dress and the social proprieties, my ragamuffin 
argumentative associates. Mrs. Segal, who still at- 
tempted to hold a protecting wing over me, took me 
to task often for not dropping in to her Sunday after- 
noon "at homes," which were the rendezvous of the 
gilded youth of our home town, and especially for neg- 
lecting to assist at the betrothal-party of her oldest 
daughter. Others of my blood observed that despite my 
aptness in picking up English, I was unpardonably slow 
in getting Americanized and doing nothing toward be- 

160 



THE TRAGEDY OF READJUSTMENT 

coming a doctor. I was making quite a lot of money, 
too, but not only did I send very little of it home, I did 
not even have a bank account. Cousin Aby, who, 
though he was still making shirt-collars, had never 
become a radical, kept eternally at me for smoking on 
the Sabbath instead of going to the services. I, for 
my part, had my own opinions of their superficial 
Americanism, their indifference to the seething intellec- 
tual life about them, their blindness to the fine merits of 
the labor cause, and missed no opportunity to express 
my views. And yet some curious bond held us to- 
gether. I had a strange feeling that I would miss them, 
that I would feel lonely without them, and I knew that 
they would take it as the final insult if I were to draw 
away from them altogether. 

These strained relations with my Old World kin, as 
well as the tragic experiences of my fellow-radicals, 
often made me pause and wonder how I should get on 
with my own parents if I were ever to succeed in 
bringing them over. Father, to be sure, was not, as 
I remembered, what one could call fanatically religious, 
and mother had implicit confidence in me to do the 
right thing. But they were both, after all, to the last 
degree old-fashioned and rigidly conservative. They 
had a horror of the very word "socialist." I recalled 
how shocked they had been once — I was a mere child 
at the time — when mother's nephew Herschel came 
back from a long sojourn in Vienna and declared himself 
a socialist. He caused a most painful sensation, and 

161 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

my parents declined to have him come to our house lest 
he should contaminate it, and his own mother treated 
him as an apostate and offered up candles at the 
synagogue for the reclaiming of his soul. Of course, 
America was a different story; and they would be 
coming into my world and not I into theirs. But it was 
difficult to imagine mother accepting me, her kaddish, 
in the role of an unbeliever, and father going off alone 
to temple on the morning of the Day of Atonement 
while I prepared for the F. A. S. picnic. I wanted 
them, however, very much to come. Conditions were 
now somewhat favorable. It was my third year at 
the trade and I was now an expert sleever. I was 
employed at the very best line; I was turning out forty 
and often fifty dozen a day; my rate (thanks, in part, 
to the union) had risen to five and a half cents, and when 
the material was silk, as it often was, I got as much as 
twenty cents per dozen. I had paid every penny on my 
watch and chain, and the instalment man was eter- 
nally asking me when I was going to give him another 
"show." Didn't I want a diamond ring or a steamer 
ticket for some one.'^ Or something? Yes, I did want 
more than one steamer ticket, and later on I would 
want, very likely, quite a lot of house-furnishings. 
But — I was revolving the problem in my head, when 
suddenly Destiny stepped in and solved it for me in 
her own summary fashion. 

Early in the spring of 1903 I wrote to my brother 
Harry, who was still at his big job in Constantza, to get 

162 



THE TRAGEDY OF READJUSTMENT 

his advice — not, of course, on the real difficulty, but on 
the general situation. He answered that, owing to the 
commercial depression in Rumania, he was himself 
thinking quite seriously of going to America. His 
suggestion was that I should send a steamer ticket to 
Paul; and then, when the three of us were together, we 
would manage by our joint efforts to bring over the 
old folks. Paul had met with hard luck at his trade 
ever since his discharge from the army, so that he had 
no money of his own to make the trip. I hunted up my 
peddler at once, gave him a deposit of five dollars on a 
direct Vaslui-New York second-class ticket, and sent 
it off to Paul. A little more than a month later I heard 
from Harry again, this time from Vaslui. He wrote 
that their preparations for the journey were completed, 
and that he meant to sail with Paul from Bremen about 
the 1st of June. I watched the ship news for the next 
four months. Several times I went down to the offices 
of the Lloyd to inquire. I haunted the piers. I even 
telephoned to Ellis Island, thinking that perhaps my 
guests had been detained there in spite of their superior 
mode of travel. But not a sign of any brothers. Not 
even a word of explanation. I was nearly out of my 
wits with apprehension. I bombarded Harry and 
father and everybody I could think of with anxious 
letters, without results. At last — it was autumn now — 
it occurred to me to make inquiries at my former 
address. My former landlady, Mrs. Bernfeld, appeared 
ill at ease at my unexpected visit, contrary to her 

163 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

habitual pleasure on seeing me. When I told her what 
I had come for she asked me nervously what made me 
think that she would not forward my mail. With my 
suspicions and fears aroused by her manner, I insisted 
that there must be something for me. Then she 
yielded it up. It was a postal card, written in the hand 
of the rabbi, advising me that father had died in 
August and urging me to perform the religious duties 
expected of a son in the circumstances. Some days 
later a second card in the same hand informed me that 
mother had caught cold at father's funeral, pneumonia 
had developed, and she had died in less than a fort- 
night. 

My brothers did not get to New York until February. 
When I met them at Hoboken we kissed and wept to- 
gether, and I got the details of my parents' death. 
Harry, being a man of business, was bent on going at 
once into an account of the disposition of the estate. 
He began by observing that since he had had to stand 
the expense of the illnesses and the funerals, it was no 
more than just that he should inherit the feather- 
bedding and the brass things. As for the remainder — 
but I waved the topic aside, assuring him that there was 
time enough for that. On the ferry-boat across the 
river I observed that he was taking me in critically. 
No sooner had we seated ourselves in an Elevated car 
than he turned upon me and, without preface or intro- 
duction, demanded to know whether I was doing my 
duty by the dead. My first impulse was to tell him 

164 



THE TRAGEDY OF READJUSTMENT 

the unpalatable truth without delay; on second thought 
I decided to spare him. This was no time for propa- 
ganda; it would merely pain him; he would not 
understand my position offhand like this. So I 
begged again for time. Brother Paul, who had thus 
far merely sat there holding my hand and devouring 
me with his eyes but saying nothing, agreed that a 
public vehicle was no place for family conferences. 
But Harry insisted. Surely I could answer a plain 
question: Did I say kaddish — yes or no? Well, it was 
yes and no. The truth was that at the first shock of 
the terrible news I had compromised with my conscience 
and had attended services, mornings before going to 
work and evenings after returning. I had kept it up 
for ten days. Then I had rebelled. I simply could not 
endure the sham of it and the self-deception. The 
lickspittle, mercenary air of the beadles had disgusted 
me. He had better wait before he judged me. 
America, he would find, would change his ideas, as she 
had changed mine. It could not be helped. Father 
and mother would forgive me. They, too, would have 
understood if they had lived and come here. Harry 
regarded me with a pitying look and turned away. He 
refused to speak to me for the next twenty -four hours. 

My brother Paul had been a spirited youngster and 
had objected to the rigid methods of education at home, 
with the consequence that he was a bit backward in 
bookish things. He found now that he had to pay the 
price of his youthful escapades. He experienced great 

165 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

diflBculties in finding his way about, in reading street 
names, and in handling foreign money. Nevertheless, 
thanks to his mechanical occupation, he was not long 
in getting work. In fact, he got his first job several 
weeks before Harry got his, and immediately offered 
to take over the payments on his ticket. Harry was 
thoroughly scandalized by everything American. He 
found every one, from Mrs. Schlesinger (our land- 
lady) down to his prospective employers and his own 
brother, coarsened and vulgarized. The children were 
too smart and forward; the women were loud and over- 
dressed and ill-mannered; above all, the shops were 
dingy and ill-kept and inelegant. From these last he 
had expected a great deal. He had thought of New 
York as a kind of magnified Bucharest — a great, refined, 
luxurious city, with beautiful stores where it would be 
a proud joy to work. That was one of the things that 
had induced him to come to America. In Rumania he 
had always been employed in the haberdasheries — 
magazins de gallanterie they were called — of the small 
Black Sea port-towns, and he had for years dreamed of 
getting a situation at one of the brilliant shops of the 
capital. His longing had never been fulfilled, and he 
had emigrated to America with a feeling that here he 
would better his own aspiration. And what did he 
find.f* Of course, the department stores on Fourteenth 
Street and on Sixth Avenue, which he sallied forth to 
look over with wistful eyes on the very day following 
his arrival, were inexpressibly wonderful; but they 

166 



THE TRAGEDY OF READJUSTMENT 

were, for the time being, at least, out of his reach. He 
had learned to speak Greek and Italian and Turkish 
in Constantza, but all these languages were of no 
earthly use in New York without English. The only 
places that were open to him were the unspeakably 
shabby holes in the Italian quarter or on Hester Street. 
They were, for the most part, in gloomy basements; 
their owners were rough, unkempt Polish and Russian 
ex-peddlers with fat, noisy wives (in one of them he 
had actually found the whole family lunching on the 
counter); the customers, instead of the sea-captains 
and naval officers and refined Greek ladies and suave 
Ottoman traders he had been accustomed to, were crude 
Sicilian peasants whose harsh dialects he scarcely under- 
stood, or East Side fish women. It made him very 
unhappy. 

I suggested that, since he had brought quite a bit of 
money with him, he could easily learn to be a cutter at 
cloaks. That, surely, was elegant enough for any taste. 
It was universally considered the next best thing to a 
doctor. The very first families in Little Rumania 
thought a "cotter" an excellent catch for their marriage- 
able daughters. All the best young men in the quarter 
who had a sense of what was "classy" were saving 
their pennies toward that end. Cousin Aby was 
dreaming of exchanging the machine for the knife as 
soon as he had enough money for the instruction fee 
and the wageless month of apprenticeship. But Harry 
cried out that my suggestion was an insult. Was that 

12 167 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

what he had clerked for all his life, and economized, 
and learned refined manners from his aristocratic 
customers in Constantza? Was that what he had 
come across seas to America for — to become a woman's 
tailor? No, thank God he had enough money left to 
go back to Rumania, where character and ability and 
gentlemanly qualities still counted for something. 
Curse Columbus and his country. He was going back. 
But he did not; because before he had time to buy his 
ticket he found a job in a basement store on Mulberry 
Street and got eight dollars a week, which he estimated 
to be nearly twice as many francs as he had ever received 
in the most elegant shop on the shores of the Black 
Sea. 

While Harry was idle he amused himself by 
rummaging among my books and papers — when he was 
not, that is, making excursions through the department 
stores. One evening — it was during the first week after 
his arrival — he picked up a copy of the Zukunft and 
regarded it dubiously. Then, with a sudden inspiration 
lighting up his puzzled face, he looked me squarely in 
the eye and charged me point-blank with being a 
socialist. I could not help marveling at his sharpness, 
because there was nothing on the cover of the publica- 
tion to betray me. His next sally enlightened me: 
"Young men who are respectable and mind their busi- 
ness," he said in a voice shaken with emotion, "do not 
waste their time reading monthly magazines. Now I 
know why you sent home so little money and why you 

168 



THE TRAGEDY OF READJUSTMENT 

do not attend to your haddish and why, after three 
years in America, you are still an operator at shirts 
instead of having a business of your own. Die Zukunft 
(The Future)," he sneered, bitterly; "a fine future will 
come to you reading this' sort of thing. Our poor 
parents would die again if they knew what has become 
of the promising son of their old age." When the April 
holidays came and I made no pretense of keeping them, 
he suffered keenly. He tried to reason with me and to 
bring me to a conviction of sin. He was older, he 
argued, and he knew better. He by no means meant 
to have me a bigot in religious matters, but my behavior 
was treason to everything that had from time imme- 
morial been sacred to our people. 

In my own justification I must say that I did every- 
thing I could, short of betraying my convictions, to 
lessen his suffering. I went to my meetings secretly 
and did all my reading at the library. I avoided argu- 
ment, even at the cost of losing a possible convert. I 
even kept all my radical friends away from our room, 
fearing that their zeal might get the better of their 
discretion. But I did not have to keep up this religious 
regimen very long. Harry had scarcely been in New 
York three months before I began to notice that he was 
rapidly undergoing a change. He began to funk in 
his prayers for the dead, offering at first the excuse that 
his long hours of employment made it impossible for 
him to go to daily services. After a time he openly 
began to smoke cigarettes on the Sabbath. I asked 

169 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

him about it, and he answered that he was not the 
simpleton I took him for. In fact, he admitted, he had 
never been able to see anything in the old-fashioned 
faith. It was all well enough for unintelligent, un- 
emancipated people, but lie was a modern man. His 
profession of enlightenment could have furnished me 
with lessons in blasphemy. But when I invited him to 
accompany me to a lecture on a Sunday evening he told 
me that he was too tired and that he needed recreation. 
It was as impossible now to get him interested in radical- 
ism as when he had landed. The ancient faith had 
gone, but nothing had come to take its place. 

All the same, it was Harry who brought me my first 
and most successful proselyte. For it was through him 
that I met my excellent friend Esther. Harry had no 
sooner got a job and opened a bank account and settled 
down to his place in the American scheme of existence 
than he invested his surplus income in some first-class 
clothes and furnishings and plunged into the social 
whirl. Unlike myself, he regularly attended Mrs, 
Segal's salon and sought out the most desirable people. 
He saw that with his knowledge of Italian it would not 
take him long to have a shop of his own, and he was 
frankly looking about for a gentle partner to share his 
future prosperity with him. On a Sunday afternoon as 
soon as his store was closed he would hurry home and 
clean up and get into his best shoes and neckwear, to say 
nothing of suits, and bolt forth on his round of calls. 

170 



THE TRAGEDY OF READJUSTMENT 

Now and then he would persuade Paul and me to go 
with him, and it was on one of the first of those occasions 
that I fell in with Esther. "" 

Something about her hearty, almost masculine hand- 
shake and her unaffected manner arrested my attention. 
Her plain way of dressing and tying her hair, the 
straightforward tone of her speech, her reserve — all 
these told me that she was not the customary Rumanian 
girl. I got into talk with her, and found that she was 
reading quite a lot, and by no means the conventional 
books for young ladies. She had been in America no 
longer than I had, but (partly because of her un- 
familiarity with Yiddish) she was managing to get on 
with English print. We compared notes, and found 
that our history as well as our leanings had much in 
common. She, too, had had her purifications. She 
had run the gamut of occupations, from cash-girl in an 
East Side department store to the factory, but now she 
was a trimmer at millinery and earning enough. Never- 
theless, she was discontented. She had a vague feeling 
that she wanted to "do" something with herself and 
with the world. 

We became fast friends. I read things to her from 
the Zukunft and from the other radical publications, 
and she drank in everything with wide eyes. This was 
a new and splendid world of ideas and ideals, she told 
me. In some remote way she had been thinking similar 
things. Then I offered to take her to a lecture. She 
went and came away radiant. She was furious with 

171 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

her folks for not having been taught the humble mother 
tongue, as her brothers had been. She had never 
dreamed of its literary treasures and of the things that 
were reported in its press. I undertook to teach her to 
read Yiddish; and before long she abandoned her 
English fiction and devoured Peretz and Gordin. 

She bettered my instruction. Although a little 
sentimental, her devotion to the radical faith was far 
more intense from the start than mine. She would 
not let me miss anything. In the hottest weather she 
would insist on going, and dragging me with her, to all 
sorts of out-of-the-way places, climbing endless flights 
of stairs, elbowing her way into jammed halls, and 
sweltering in the close air until the end. If I objected, 
she would look at me like Conscience incarnate and ask 
me whether I was not backsliding and whether I was 
not becoming a bourgeois "again"! At such times I 
would tell her that I wished I had bit off my tongue 
before talking to her about the Movement. But in 
the depths of my heart I was very proud of her. She 
was such a soul as any missionary might well be proud 
of having saved. And she was even a better friend 
than she was a disciple. 



XV 

THE TRIALS OF SCHOLARSHIP 

Y radical interests had one salutary result im- 
mediately. I was not content to know at second- 
hand the great writers and thinkers whom I heard con- 
tinually discussed. But in order to read them I must 
know English. I began my literary study of the lan- 
guage one memorable night by borrowing a one- volume 
edition of the complete works of Shakespeare from the 
Bond Street library. As soon as I got home I eagerly 
opened my treasure and turned to "Hamlet." To 
read "Hamlet" in the original had long been one of 
my most ambitious dreams. But, to my disappoint- 
ment, I found that I could not get more than one word 
in ten, and of the sense nothing at all. Shakespeare as 
a first reader proved a total failure. 

It was then I decided to go to school, although I 
should mention that my inspiration came in great part 
from Abe Wykoff, whom I had shortly before met at 
a lecture. The chap was a cloak-maker with ambitions 
similar to my own. As we came out of the building he 
said: "Comrade, I am going to throw up the machine. 
I am sick of cloaks. Three months in the year you 

173 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

work overtime till midnight so that it nearly kills you 
intellectually and physically. And the rest of the time 
you are so hard up you have not a dime for the Zuhunft. 
I am going to study dentistry. I had a little training 
at home, and I think I can pull through. Then 
liberty! Time to read and to think — to be a human 
being. I listened to Feigenbaum here the other night — 
did you hear him on 'Dominant Figures in World 
Literature?' — and it made my heart sick. Goethe, 
Calderon, Racine, Dante, what do I know about them? 
Hearsay, nothing more. I want to get into them, 
but, good Lord! where is the leisure? A professional 
man is different. I hear that Gordin and the others 
are getting together to start a progressive school for 
workmen. You and I ought to look into it. It is to 
be called the Educational League." 

The new organization opened its doors toward the 
end of August, and Abe and I were among the first 
of its pupils. Tuition was entirely free, and there were 
no restrictions as to the choice of studies. All of the 
teachers gave their services without pay and with no 
lack of enthusiasm. Before a month had passed the 
place was filled — a student body made up of boys and 
girls in their teens, bearded men and middle-aged 
women, former gymnasium students from Russia and 
semi-illiterates from Galicia — all the ages and types of 
the diversified Ghetto. But the school turned out to 
be somewhat of a disappointment. Its fine liberal 
spirit tended to degenerate into a mere absence of 

174 



THE TRIALS OF SCHOLARSHIP 

system and order. Pupils came in at all hours and 
interrupted the classes. Attendance was irregular, and 
those who were present one night were unable to follow 
the lesson because of what they had missed the night 
before. The program of the league, moreover, was 
an odd one. Its twelve rooms housed a course of study 
which began with elementary arithmetic and spelling 
and ended 'with university courses in evolution, the 
philosophy of Nietzsche, the history of the labor move- 
ment, Attic tragedy, and comparative religion; and 
teachers and students alike were too interested in the 
lectures and discussions on literary and social matters 
to give much attention to the exercises in orthography. 
By the latter part of September I took an inventory of 
my added stock of knowledge, and found that I had 
learned the names of some fourscore new books and 
authors as well as the difference in meaning between the 
English words "county" and "country" and "ex- 
cellent" and "surpassing," of which latter I was far 
from certain. 

Fortunately, there had lately begun to appear a 
whole crop of evening preparatory schools on East 
Broadway — largely, no doubt, a result of the league's 
experiment. They were usually owned and manned by 
young East-Siders who had recently graduated from the 
City College. I entered one of them simply in order to 
study English; but, once there, my ambitions expanded. 
I recalled my father's professional hopes for me, and 
conferred with my teachers about the possibility of 

175 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

preparing for a medical college. They encouraged me, 
and I agreed to pay fifty dollars for the forty-eight- 
point Regents' course in monthly instalments of five 
dollars each. 

The institution occupied the remodeled top flats of 
two buildings on both sides of the street. The ground 
floor of one of them was occupied by a second-hand 
bookstore, and the basement of the other housed a 
butcher shop. The class-rooms themselves were on 
off nights the meeting places of lodges and societies, 
and one of them did alternate duty as a chemical 
laboratory and a house of worship, as the brass candela- 
bra and the paraphernalia on the east wall showed. 

I used to travel across the street from algebra to 
English, and back again for German. The stoops and 
the halls and the stairways were always crowded with 
students, and during change of classes it was almost 
impossible to break through. I often wondered what 
would happen if there were a fire. At last the manage- 
ment rented a flat in a third building and turned it 
into a waiting-room and study-hall. The classes were 
overcrowded, so that, even with the best instructors, 
anything like a recitation was a practical impossibility. 

The evening was divided into four periods, beginning 
at seven-fifteen and ending at eleven o'clock. As there 
were four Regents' examinations annually, our school 
year was arranged into four corresponding terms. 
Every course ran through a term. For instance, I took 
algebra three times a week for ten weeks and then went 

176 



THE TRIALS OF SCHOLARSHIP 

V n to the Grand Central Palace and passed the examina- 
tion along with high-school pupils who had had the 
work five times a week for a year. I cannot tell you 
how we did it. I only remember that I would sit and 
puzzle over x's and y's from the time I got home at 
eleven o'clock until my eyes would give out; and at 
seven in the morning I would be back at the machine 
sewing shirts. I had registered late, and had missed 
the first two or three lessons. For a time the idea of 
algebra simply would not get through my head. 

But even algebra was as nothing beside English. We 
were trying to cover the prescribed Regents' require- 
ments, in spite of the fact that the majority of us could 
hardly speak a straight English sentence. The formal 
grammar, which was the bugbear of nearly everybody 
in the class, did not worry me. The terms were the 
same as in Rumanian, and I had been well trained at 
home. But the classics! We began, mind you, with 
Milton. The nights and the Sundays I spent on 
*'L' Allegro" and "II Penseroso," looking up words and 
classical allusions, if I had devoted them as earnestly 
to shirt-making, would have made me rich. And then 
I would go to class and the teacher would ask me 
whether I thought there were two separate persons in 
the poems, or just one person in two different moods. 
Bless my soul! I had not thought there were any 
persons in it at all. I had made up my mind that it 
was something about a three-headed dog that watched 
at the gate of Hades, whatever that was. So I would 

177 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

go back and read those puzzling lines again and again, 
in a sort of blind hope that sheer repetition would some- 
how make me understand them, until I got them by 
heart. I can recite them yet. 

As soon as I got straightened out a bit, I tried to 
take a little interest in the social life of my school. 
There was a socialist club, and a zionist society, and a 
chess club, and a debating club, and I don't remember 
how many others, that sent their representatives around 
with notices to the grammar class. One of the teachers 
was giving an unscheduled course in Greek between 
six and seven, and I joined it in the hope that it might 
enable me to read the dramas of Sophocles in the 
original. On Sunday nights the instructors took turns 
in lecturing in the study-hall on the other works of the 
authors we were studying in English and German, or 
on the colleges and universities of America, or on art, 
and I was drinking in a lot of things that the radical 
educators had omitted. In the debating society, too, 
the subjects were a little out of the usual. American 
politics and prohibition and the nature of the trusts 
touched elbows with such familiar things as the refer- 
endum and the initiative and the true Shakespearian 
conception of the character of Shylock; and what I 
particularly liked about the organization was that it 
gave greater opportunities for self-expression (and in 
English) than the regular lectures did. 

My schooling brought a lot of new problems with it, 
and not all of them academic. Some of them were the 

178 



THE TRIALS OF SCHOLARSHIP 

old, familiar ones with a new wrinkle. As a student 
I could not work overtime, and many a row I had with 
the boss about it. That meant a reduction in my 
weekly envelope of about two dollars. There were the 
monthly five-dollar payments, and several books every 
quarter, which, however, one was not compelled to 
buy, since the school itself supplied them at a nominal 
rental of ten cents a month each. My room rent was 
raised by fifty cents a month to pay for the midnight 
gas I was burning. One had to dress a little better, 
and shave oftener, and pay club dues. 

But all this additional expense I could have endured. 
It was the match-makers who made day and night 
hideous for me. Being a prospective doctor had made 
me quite a commodity in the marriage-market. One 
of the men in the factory called my attention to the 
fact that a certain pretty finisher had five hundred 
dollars in the bank. An old woman of my acquaintance 
hunted me up in my room one night after school to 
make me a tempting offer. She knew of a rich jewelry- 
peddler who was ready to finance me through college 
on condition that I become engaged to his daughter. 
"And he is a fellow-countryman of yours, too," she 
added, "and of such a fine family! And the girl! A 
jewel in the sight of God and man. Full of virtues. 
Educated like a bookkeeper. Reads German — it is a 
joy to hear her; and English, as if born to it." And all 
this while I had a load of German and English of my 
own to get through with before morning. 

179 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

Not only among my own relatives, but in Little 
Rumania generally, I was causing an immense furore. 
My cousins and second cousins and aunts and uncles, 
to say nothing of my brothers, never ceased bragging 
about my change for the better. Even Couza, whom 
I had not seen since my barroom days, was pleased, and 
took occasion to remember that he was entitled to 
some of the credit because if it had not been for him I 
would still be in Vaslui. Cousin Jacob, who had in 
the mean time" settled affairs " in Rumania and followed 
his family, grinned with delight and forgave me my 
irreligious practices, and declared that he had always 
known that I would one of these days come to my 
senses. Next-door neighbors and fellow-townsmen 
beat a path to my hall bedroom to find out exactly 
what profession I meant to pursue and ventured an 
opinion as to which was the most profitable or the least 
irksome or the most elegant. I was set up as an 
arbiter on every variety of disputed question, linguistic, 
geographical, legal, and what not. Was Minneapolis 
in the South .^^ If a chap had promised to marry a girl 
in Buzeu and now refused to marry her, could she sue 
him for breach of promise in New York.f* Was the 
dollar-mark derived from U. ^.? Which was right, 
" myself " or " meself "? And if one, why not the other? 
Why could one say "yesterday" and not "yesternight"? 
If I confessed that I really did not know the answer to 
all these diflficult questions, then I was told that pride 
goeth before a fall, and that I must not get so stuck on 

180 



THE TRIALS OF SCHOLARSHIP 

myself, or else that I was a queer kind of a "college 
boy." 

In January, at the end of my first three-month term, 
I took the examinations in English, algebra, and third- 
year German, and reaped five points. That left ten 
more between me and college. Unfortunately, it left 
something more besides, which even a conscientious 
student could not get by means of examinations. As 
we drew toward the end of our preparation, we 
"seniors," as we were called, had but one topic for 
discussion — how to get into and through college. I 
cannot enumerate half the schemes we cooked up. 
Some of us did more daring things than marry pluto- 
crats' daughters. A great number became druggists, 
taking pharmacy as a stepping-stone to the higher 
ambition because it only required about one-fourth the 
number of counts and only one year in college. I knew 
several boys who became conductors and robbed the 
street-railway companies of nickels until they were 
caught and discharged, alas! too soon. 

I myself, in company with Alfred (now Doctor) 
Goodman, chose another, more diflficult, course. When 
September came, a year after I had entered school, 
I had enough credits to enter college on a condition, 
and, of course, no money even for the matriculation 
fee. Then Goodman heard of the State scholarships 
and came and told me about them. The stipend was 
good for four years' tuition at Cornell University, but 
the scholarships were open to none but high-school 

181 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

pupils. I fretted at the loss of a year, but there was 
nothing for it but to go to high school and make myself 
eligible. I remember the afternoon when Goodman and 
I decided to go around to the nearest high school to 
find out what we had to do to get in. In our ignorance 
we wandered into a girls' institution somewhere on 
Thirteenth Street, and got laughed at at every turn, 
and as far as I can now recall never got as far as the 
principal's office at all. From a policeman on the 
street we learned that what we were looking for was the 
De Witt Clinton High School, which was a considerable 
distance up-town. There a warm-hearted old gentle- 
man, whom I came later to know as Dr. Buchanan, 
the principal, took charge of us, and extracted from us 
our entire personal and family history, and gave us 
several score of cards to fill out, and conducted us about 
the building as if we were noted visitors, and introduced 
us to our teachers and commended us to their mercy 
because we "had never seen the inside of a public 
school." 

We were admitted to the fifth form, and blushed with 
shame at finding ourselves in a class with mere young- 
sters. The English instructor was not much older than 
we were. On the very first test we were asked to write 
a hundred and fifty words on "School Spirit," and 
Alfred and I exchanged frightened glances and handed 
in blank papers. But the next day the teacher told us 
that we must not be bashful when we did not under- 
stand an assignment and allowed us to take our choice 

182 



THE TRIALS OF SCHOLARSHIP 

of subjects and marked our substitute papers ninety- 
five and ninety-eight, respectively, and scribbled 
"excellent" on the margin for good measure. Things 
did not go quite so well, however, in the other classes. 
In the history-room the teacher was altogether helpless 
in the hands of his pupils, and in his misery he found 
fault with everything Goodman and I did, from the 
manner of our taking notes to our English intonation. 
How those boys could be so disrespectful to a learned 
man our European minds could not grasp at all. They 
threw chalk at him and at one another as soon as he 
turned his back to write on the blackboard, and cat- 
called him, and one fat youngster even went to the 
length of getting up and waltzing around the room in 
the middle of another boy's farcical recitation. And 
yet, as soon as they came into the physics-room, these 
same pupils became as meek as lambs and as attentive 
as a Clinton Hall audience. 

We suffered so horribly under the discipline that at 
the end of a week Goodman gave up the effort and 
borrowed the money to go to a second-rate medical 
school where the tuition was comparatively cheap. At 
the evening school there had never been any insistence 
on getting exercises and themes into the hands of the 
teachers at any particular time. It was assumed that 
the work was done, as a matter of course. If a student 
could not or would not follow out assignments, he 
naturally dropped out altogether and devoted his 

money and his time to more pleasurable avocations 
13 183 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

than going to school after a hard day's work in the 
sweat-shop. At CHnton, however, nothing was taken 
for granted; and I, who had fallen into the habit of 
doing lessons thoroughly enough, but by the method of 
inspiration, came into constant collision with the more 
conservative of my teachers, and was reported to my 
"guardian" for insubordination, and was kept in the 
detention room after classes when I should have been 
out earning my living, and was peremptorily sent down 
to see the principal, who did nothing more tyrannical, 
however, than to take me parentally by the arm and to 
tell me smilingly that he knew there were more ways 
than one to kill a cat, and that if I would not tell it 
*'in Gath" he would confess to me that he thought my 
way as efficient as any, but that, nevertheless, I would 
find it beneficial to adopt in part, if I could, the ways of 
authority. I don't know how long my tormentors 
would have kept on worrying me if it had not gotten 
abroad that I had offered to join the penal class in 
higher spelling, of my own free will, which my task- 
masters accepted at once as a submission and as a 
stoic challenge to them to do their worst. 

Going to day school necessitated giving up my shirts, 
which rendered the financial situation exceedingly 
tense. More than once I lacked the car fare to get to 
the school on 102d Street, and then I must either get 
up at five in the morning and walk, or invent some 
plausible but altogether untruthful excuse and compose 
a letter of explanation which must be signed by my 

184 



THE TRIALS OF SCHOLARSHIP 

landlady — a process that, no doubt, appears simple 
enough to the uninitiated, but was, all the same, fraught 
with perils and difficulties because Mrs. Schlesinger had 
neglected to acquire the art of writing, and if I signed 
it myself with her name I made myself liable to the 
charge of forgery and the criminal punishments apper- 
taining thereto. To make ends meet I attempted a 
return to the familiar occupation of peddling (on the 
grand scale, with a pushcart, this time, and the merchan- 
dise second-hand books instead of sweetmeats) but 
found it less congenial and less profitable — my wants 
having become extravagant — than in the old days. So 
I advertised myself, in Cousin Freedman's coffee-house 
window, as a private instructor in English and arithme- 
tic. I charged twenty-five cents an hour, which would 
have brought me wealth enough if only the powers 
above had not cut the day to a skimpy twenty-four 
hours and if the desire for self-improvement in Lit- 
tle Rumania had not been so scarce. Time was 
particularly at a premium, inasmuch as my pupils were 
possessed with an excessive curiosity about the meanings 
of all sorts of words that I had not inquired into, so 
that if I prized my dignity and self-respect I must 
devote hour for hour to preparing my lessons; and also 
because the ancient problem of distances had still to 
be solved. 

And then when the struggle was all over it turned out 
that I had labored and suffered in vain. Somehow I 
had never stopped to question my ability to win the 

185 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

scholarship. Yet it required only a trifling accident to 
smash the hope on which I had staked everything. I 
scored ninety-six in English, and nearly as high in all 
the other subjects except one. In physics I was 
marked fifty. Out of four questions one was on the 
rainbow and another on some species of dynamo, 
neither of which topics had been touched on at all in 
the class. A month later I took the Regents' examina- 
tion in that same subject, and, I believe, under the 
same examiners, and passed "with honor," which 
meant a percentage of over ninety. So decisive are 
examinations ! 



XVI 

OFF TO COLLEGE 

BUT to college I went that autumn, all the same. 
The examinations were no sooner over than I gave 
up my tutoring and my school and began to cast about 
for something real to do. I had entered the high school 
to attain a particular object. It had been defeated; 
but I had got something else in its stead. I had im- 
proved my English; I had acquired new and more regu- 
lar methods of study ; I had completed my entrance re- 
quirements, so that I need not worry now about working 
off "conditions" in college. Still, there was no sense 
in keeping up the grind, even though the authorities 
sent postal card after postal card to Mrs. Schlesinger, 
threatening me with the visitations of the truant officer. 
They were snail-slow in that city institution. The 
course was, to all intents and purposes, finished; but 
they were taking the entire month from the end of 
May to the last of June to review and "wind up." I 
could do better with those four weeks. Time was 
precious. If I got busy straight away, that very 
month might decide whether I should graduate in 
1910 or 1911. 

187 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

In a financial sense I was no better off now than a 
year ago — rather worse, if anything. I had not only 
fallen behind by a year, so that if I entered college at 
all I would be a freshman when Goodman and a lot 
of others of my companions would be sophomores; I 
had missed the chance of laying up some money toward 
the lean years that were ahead of me. The failure to 
earn the State scholarship I had come to take philo- 
sophically. It merely prevented me from going to 
Cornell — the university I had set my heart on. But 
that prize would, after all, have paid ordy my tuition; 
my living expenses I must earn in any event. At one 
of the free out-of-town colleges, to be sure, it might 
prove harder to find work. But hadn't I tried this 
past year to combine study with business in New York.? 
And with what results .^^ Besides, college was not high 
school. By all accounts a medical student had practi- 
cally no time left when his day in the lecture-room and 
the laboratory was over. In a small town there would 
at least be no wastage in traveling back and forth. 

The road to follow was, therefore, plain: I must 
utilize every bit of the three or four months between now 
and the opening of college. How? that was the ques- 
tion. Ornstein and Stein — my former employers — had 
a vacancy at the double-needle machine. But a week's 
trial revealed the fact that shirts were going through 
one of their periodic slack seasons that summer. The 
union, too, had disintegrated, and piece prices were at 
their worst. Just when I was perfectly ready to work 

188 



OFF TO COLLEGE 

overtime there was hardly enough to do during the 
day. A Httle figuring showed me that at the present 
rate I would not get enough together by September to 
pay even for my trip to college. 

Fortunately my good cousin David was an electrician 
and was working as a lineman at the Pennsylvania 
Terminal, then building. I knew nothing about the 
trade beyond a few odd terms, such as "potential," 
"cathoids," "alternating current," and "Leyden jar," 
which I had picked up in my study of physics, and 
which David did not know and regarded as worse than 
useless. Nevertheless, he managed to get me taken on 
as his helper at a wage of one dollar and seventy-five 
cents a day. David was devoting his evenings to taking 
care of the tenement-house he was living in, and he 
insisted that I must come and take a room in his 
apartment. "You can save about twenty dollars," 
he urged, "and it will be no loss to me. We have more 
space than we can use, and I am not paying any rent." 
Once he got me up there he pointed out that there were 
no restaurants in the neighborhood (except American 
ones, which served food I could not eat), so that I must 
eat at his table. When the week was up and I asked 
Rose, his wife, to tell me how much I owed her, she sent 
me about my business, and added with a laugh that I 
could pay all in a bunch at the rate of ten dollars a 
week when I became a doctor, or I might reimburse her 
by treating her four children. 

That David family saved the situation. Rose even 

189 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

persisted, in spite of all my protests, to double the 
number of her husband's sandwiches, which she packed 
for him every morning along with a bottle of cold coffee ; 
so that my lunch money went likewise to increase the 
great pile. David and I had an hour at noon; so I 
carried a book with me to work every day and employed 
the better part of the period in going over the English 
and American classics I had studied. Once one of the 
engineers on the job found my copy of Emerson's 
Essays in the supply-chest, and he asked David whose 
it was. My cousin pointed proudly at me. The 
gentleman, however, did not seem impressed. He 
threw me a sidelong glance and smiled superiorly. 
When he was gone, David burst out laughing. " That's 
a good one on him," he cried. "He doesn't know you 
could give him a few pointers. Why didn't you speak 
up, you big silly, and tell him that he wasn't the only 
college guy on the place.^" 

The whole world, however, is not made up of Davids 
and Roses, and my family was no exception to the rule. 
Looking ahead, I could see that the dollars I was 
saving would hardly suffice to carry me through. A 
friend (who, for reason of his own, must remain name- 
less) offered to lend me fifty dollars. But the attempt 
to persuade my two brothers to contribute each an 
equal amount met with only partial success. Indeed, 
my relatives, who had up to this time been very proud 
of my ambitions and my achievements, now held up 
their hands in solemn disapproval at my selfishness. It 

190 



OFF TO COLLEGE 

was all very well, they declared, to become a doctor, 
but this business of borrowing money to get there was 
carrying matters to extremes. My cousin, the collar- 
maker, could not see why shirt-making was good enough 
for him and not for me. Another cousin thought I had 
enough education already. A third was convinced that 
I could persuade Mr. Rockefeller to lend me the money. 
Uncle Berl confessed quite frankly that he had his 
doubts about a fellow who could not win a paltry 
scholarship ever becoming a doctor, anyhow. Uncle 
Schmerl equally as frankly laid it before the whole 
assemblage that it was a foolish thing to encourage a 
poor boy to rise above his kind so that he might later 
put on airs and be ashamed of his own kindred. 
Brother Harry was not so philosophical as all that, but 
he was intending to go into business for himself. 
Might it not be best, he wanted to know, to wait another 
year and in the mean time earn the money at the 
machine.'^ Only gentle Paul was silent at the family 
council — except to say that as long as he kept his job 
he would spare me his dollar a week. But all the 
advice and the censure was to no purpose. I had made 
up my mind. Money or no money, I was going. My 
earnings as an electrician would pay my fare. The 
Lord might do the worrying about the rest. 

To my great astonishment, I discovered that even 
my radical associates were stanchly opposed to my plans 
and my ambitions. I had confidently expected that 
they, at least, would understand my longing for 

191 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

emancipation and approve of it. It was from them, 
largely, that I had got the inspiration — the worship 
of learning, the ideal of culture, the dream for a higher 
plane of life. They had no illusions about the wretched, 
precarious existence of the working-man. They con- 
stantly lamented his lot, his oppression by the rulers 
and capitalists, his lack of opportunity to develop 
himself, his imprisonment in dingy lofts and airless 
tenements. Their newspapers and their lecturers never 
tired of insisting that the liberation of the working-class 
could only come by education, and that this education 
must come from within, from the conscious endeavor 
of the proletariat itself. Well, here I was carrying 
their theories into practice. I was going to get 
educated, to lift myself out of my class. I was going to 
make my fight for the freedom and the leisure and the 
opportunity to develop which they had taught me was 
the inalienable right of every man. Why should they 
not give me their most enthusiastic support? 

I remember the stormy discussion at the anarchist 
reading-room that followed upon my announcement. 
Isidore Lipshitz, the cadaverous, curly-haired closer, 
who had befriended me in the days of my apprentice- 
ship and had witnessed the beginning of my career, 
burst out into sarcastic, fiendish laughter; and Joe 
Shapiro, affectionately nicknamed the "red bull," 
jumped to his feet and launched into a passionate 
denunciation of my sacrilegious perversion of radical 
principles: 

192 



OFF TO COLLEGE 

"The class-conscious proletariat is no longer good 
enough for you," he shouted. "You want to go to 
college, to become a gentleman and a bourgeois; to 
wear spats, I suppose, and silk gloves, quite like a little 
clodpate. All right, go, and the devil take you. 
But" — and here he waved a menacing finger in my 
face — "don't you come around here and pollute this 
place with your infernal sophistries. Did you hear that, 
Isidore.'^ To our lecturers he compares himself. The 
cheek of the nix! Who ever told you that Feigenbaum 
and Hermalin and Liessin have gone to college? They 
started in the shop and they have developed by their 
own brains and the right kind of reading. But they 
have stuck to their class and have devoted themselves 
to the interests of the worker. They have not tried to 
climb in among the church-walkers and the capitalists 
and the oppressors. Traitor!" 

In vain I tried to make myself heard and to explain 
that by getting a thorough education I was serving the 
best interests of my class. As a factory hand, I argued, 
all my energy and struggling against a complex system 
was doomed to be unavailing. They insisted that the 
emancipation of the worker could only come by the 
education of the body as a whole, not by the sporadic, 
selfish scrambling out of individuals into the ranks of 
the oppressors. My place was in the shop, among the 
men and women who were building up the movement 
with their blood and their brains. They predicted that 
no sooner would I enter college than my class-conscious- 

193 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

ness would melt away and I would begin to feel myself 
as belonging in the camp of the enemy. My whole 
course was treason to the cause of labor. I smiled 
incredulously at their passionate presentiments; but the 
event, as you shall see, proved that they were not 
altogether wrong. 

The only person I got any comfort out of was Esther. 
She admitted that theoretically there was, no doubt, 
something to be said for the point of view of our radical 
friends, but that in practice I was entirely right. She 
even found an element of the heroic in my undertaking. 
As long as the world was what it was there was nothing 
for the individual to do but to make the most of his own 
opportunities. Besides, I was not merely striving for 
economic betterment, if at all; and it was pure senti- 
mental nonsense to raise objections against the aspira- 
tions of a hungry mind. About my financial difficulties 
she was equally encouraging. With my energy and 
my various abilities I ought to have no trouble at all 
in earning all I spent, to say nothing of my modest 
hope of making a dollar a week. 

So, in the autumn of 1906, 1 started out on my great 
adventure. Throughout the summer I had been stud- 
ying catalogues from all the ends of the country and 
making the rounds of all cut-rate ticket-offices in the 
city, in an effort to make my scant savings go as far 
as I could. The New York medical colleges, with their 
tuition rates of one hundred and fifty dollars and up- 
ward, were, of course, out of the question. Some of 

194 



OFF TO COLLEGE 

the State universities, I found, charged no tuition fees; 
but a study of certain tables contained in the bulletin 
showed that the minimum expenditure for board and 
room per year was two hundred and fifty dollars. 
Heaven preserve me! One hundred was my limit, and 
I would have to earn the most of that. Therefore, 
even those schools that promised reasonable living 
expenses had to be passed up, as long as their cata- 
logues said nothing about ways and means. Finally, 
after two months of figuring and comparing, I chose the 
University of Missouri. It appeared to combine all the 
advantages of economy with high academic standards. 
I calculated that by living at the dormitories and 
boarding at the University Dining Club I could make 
an appreciable cut in my first estimate. Perhaps I 
could skimp through the year on seventy-five dollars 
and pay my railroad fare with the remainder of the 
hundred. And the reports of the Y. M. C. A. made me 
feel certain that I could earn the better part of the 
outlay by doing odd jobs. 

I did not start from New York until two weeks after 
the oflScial opening of the university. My experience 
in the night school had taught me how to do a month's 
work in a week, so that I had no doubt of my ability 
to catch up with my classes. As long as I had a job, 
I felt that I ought to keep it as long as I could. Heaven 
alone knew when I would have another. So I worked 
at the Pennsylvania Terminal until one Friday late in 
September. On Saturday I packed my belongings, 

195 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

bought the return half of an excursion ticket to St. 
Louis for three dollars less than the regular price, and 
went around to say good-by to my friends. Goodman 
gave me a pound of Russian tobacco and a case of five 
hundred cigarettes from his father's shop. Esther 
wanted to give me her fountain-pen, but I would not 
let her, and made her accept my two leather-bound 
quarto volumes of Dickens (left-overs from my book- 
selling venture) in gratitude for her confidence in me. 
On Sunday I was off. My brothers, my cousins, and 
a number of my schoolfellows came to the station. As 
I scrambled into the car with my telescope case and 
my big bundle of food for the journey, the women-folks 
burst into tears. "Poor Max!" they cried. "What 
will become of him out there in the wilderness, among 
strangers, cut off from the world.?" I tried to smile 
encouragingly, but my heart was in my throat. I was 
to learn the reason for those kind, silly tears soon 
enough. I was going to the land of the "real 
Americans." 



PART IV 
AMERICA OF THE AMERICANS 



XVII 

IN THE MOLD 

I AM sure that if the immigrant to America were ever 
to dream of the things that await him at his journey's 
end there would be no need for any laws to keep him 
out. He would prefer to eat grass and kiss the royal 
scepter and stay at home. Any man, I suppose, with 
a drop of vagabond's blood in his make-up and a family 
to support will, under the stress of necessity, fold his 
tent and move on to greener pastures; and no human 
soul will indefinitely endure the insolence of oppression 
without flaming into revolt. But there is, on the other 
hand, a generally accepted limit to the price of bread 
and freedom beyond which even a hungry and a weary 
voyager, if he retains a sense of value and of honor, will 
not go, purely as a matter of principle. One may be 
willing to submit, with a kind of grim cheerfulness, to 
train-robbers and steerage pirates, to seasickness and 
homesickness, to customs officials and — though this is 
really too much — even to Ellis Island inspectors; and 
count the whole thing — with the heart- wringing fare- 
wells thrown in — as a tolerably fair exchange for the 
right to live and the means of living. But no one, I 

H 199 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

insist, would for a moment consider the transaction if 
he suspected that he must, before he is through, become 
an American into the bargain. Mortal man is ready for 
everything except spiritual experiences. 

For I hardly need tell you that becoming an American 
is spiritual adventure of the most volcanic variety. I 
am not talking of taking out citizen's papers. It can- 
not be too often repeated that the shedding of one 
nationality and the assumption of another is something 
more than a matter of perfunctory formalities and 
solemn oaths to a flag and a constitution. Vowing 
allegiance to the state is one thing. But renouncing 
your priceless inherited identity and blending your 
individual soul with the soul of an alien people is quite 
another affair. And it is this staggering experience of 
the spirit — this slipping of his ancient ground from under 
the immigrant's feet, this commingling of souls toward 
a new birth, that I have in mind when I speak of 
becoming an American. To be born in one world and 
grow to manhood there, to be thrust then into the 
midst of another with all one's racial heritage, with 
one's likes and dislikes, aspirations and prejudices, and 
to be abandoned to the task of adjusting within one's 
own being the clash of opposed systems of culture, 
tradition, and social convention — if that is not heroic 
tragedy, I should like to be told what is. 

I got to Columbia, Missouri, in the evening two days 
later. I had written to the president of the university 

200 



IN THE MOLD 

to tell him by what train I would arrive, and I was a 
little taken aback to find that he had not even sent any 
one to meet me. There were a lot of students at the 
station, but they paid no attention to me. They were 
making a great deal of noise and shaking hands in a 
boisterous sort of way with one or two decidedly rural- 
looking boys who had come in on the train with me. I 
began to feel very lonely. Yes, began was the word. It 
was to be continued. 

My first thought was to make straight for the 
university and ask for the president. He was the 
only person who knew who I was. But inquiry revealed 
the fact that the campus was a good half-mile from the 
station, so I decided to wait until morning. There 
was a house not far awa}^ that looked like my own home 
in Vaslui, and it bore a sign with the word "Hotel" 
over its eaves. I went in and asked an old negro about 
a lodging for the night. He said the place was full, 
and conducted me across the street to what he called 
the annex. There I was given a room. In the morning 
I dressed and began to look for the kitchen. A little 
girl asked me whether I wanted breakfast. I said, 
"No; I'll have breakfast after I come back from the 
president's house. But where is the sink.'' I want to 
wash." It took her some time to understand me; 
then she grinned, and pointed to a pitcher and bowl on 
a little stand in my room. 

At the university I learned that the president was 
out of town. But a clerk told me, with a twinkle in 

201 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

her eye, that if I wanted to be registered she would show 
me where to go. At the registrar's office another clerk 
surprised me by saying that he remembered my name 
quite well, because he had got all the letters I had 
written to the president, and then astonished me still 
more by producing a folder which contained every one 
of them. He said, pleasantly, that my name was so 
unusual that he could not forget it, and added some 
other polite remarks about the fine city New York was 
and his hopes as to my happiness in Missouri. 

Then we got down to business, and I felt my heart 
sinking as I watched my hard-earned funds melting 
away under his efficient pencil. 

"Let's see, your incidental fee will be five dollars; 
biology lab., five again; you are going to take chemistry 
I — lab. fee, ten dollars." 

I don't know just where I would have landed at this 
remorseless rate if I had not had enough presence of 
mind to interrupt him here. 

"You will excuse me.''" I asked. "I am afraid I 
shall have to wait a little, until I get some more money 
from New York, before I go any further." 

"Yes?" 

"You see, it is like this. I was hoping that I could 
earn something first. Is there not a Christian Associa- 
tion that gets work for students?" 

"Yes. To your right, in the corridor, as you go 
out." 

His courtesy made me bold. "You do not suppose 

202 



IN THE MOLD 

I could arrange to make my payments to the university 
more gradually, say a dollar a week?" I asked. 

He did not know. He had never heard of its being 
done. But I might see the chairman of the Entrance 
Committee on the next floor. 

"And I am sorry to tell you," he added, "that there 
is one other item which I omitted. Registration closed 
a week ago. There will be a late registration fee of 
five dollars." I could see he was completely desolated 
about my plight. 

Did I have a room, he wanted to know next. If not, 
there was the Y. M. C. A. again, or the bulletin-board in 
Academic Hall. I would have no trouble in finding 
just what I wanted. 

No, I had no room as yet, but how about Lathrop 
Hall.'^ I should prefer to live in the dormitory. 

He took me in with a sidelong glance. "I should not 
advise you to," he concluded. "You will find the boys 
a little jolly there." 

"I do not mind that," I assured him, while my 
thoughts lingered anxiously on my resources. 

Well, there was another difficulty. Not being a 
resident of the State, I was ineligible. But I could 
make my money go a long way at the University 
Dining Club, if I would buy a permit for twenty 
dollars. Twenty dollars! when I had seventeen in 
the whole world. 

So I went around to the Y. M. C. A. and was told again 
that I was a little late. Most of the jobs had been 

203 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

grabbed up weeks ago. Likewise, the chairman of the 
Entrance Committee saw no way of agreeing to my 
odd suggestion about easy payments. If I were a 
sophomore he might recommend me to the Loan Fund 
Committee. Anyhow, he would see that I got back my 
late registration fee if I filled out a blank stating the 
reasons for my tardiness. After wandering about in 
the buildings I came upon the bulletin-board and 
discovered scores of requests for roomers and room- 
mates and "baching partners." Here was a ray of 
hope. The majority of the rooms seemed to rent for 
six dollars a month, so that with a room-mate the 
expense would come to very little more than at the 
dormitory. But room-mates, as I was soon to learn, 
were a knottier problem than funds. 

I jotted down a few addresses of boarding-houses, as 
well as the names of several students who announced 
that they had second-hand books for sale, and with- 
drew to the grounds to contemplate my situation. I 
walked across to the center of the quadrangle and sat 
down with my back against the base of one of the ivy- 
covered columns. Most likely they would wait with 
breakfast for me at the hotel; oh, well, let them wait. 
I was in no humor for food. My brain was in a turmoil. 
What I needed was air and the power to think straight. 
Now then, the first step was to clear out of that dollar- 
and-a-half house and take up lodgings, for the time 
being, in as inexpensive a place as might be found. 
Good economics told me that, in spite of the extortionate 

204 



IN THE MOLD 

price, the permit to the U. D. Club would prove a wise 
investment. Therefore the next step was to despatch 
a special-delivery letter to my friend in New York for 
the promised fifty dollars. And, above all things, I 
must not let the pessimism of the Y.M.C. A, office para- 
lyze my spirit. Somehow I must see the thing through. 
If I cannot get German translations I shall wash dishes 
or clean shoes or peddle or — 

But at this point my ruminations were rudely broken 
into, and I had my first set-to with the American 
reality. Two young gentlemen, emerging from the 
Engineering Building, were making their way toward 
me, earnestly conferring as they went. I glanced up 
at their faces, and told myself with some trepidation 
that I was in for it. There was an unmistakable 
bellicose light in their eyes. What had I done.'' Then 
I heard one whisper, "Go for him. Bud." My first 
impulse was to clear the field while there was yet time. 
But my curiosity got the better of me, and I waited in 
suspense to see what would happen. "Bud" advanced 
with one hand behind him. 

"Freshman.'*" he asked, laconically, as he stopped in 
front of me. 

A happy inspiration dashed the word "yes" from off 
my tongue, and I replied in the negative. 

"Soph?" he persisted. 

"Yes." 

"Where from?" 

"Cornell." 

205 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

"Well, you'll have to get off the mound. Only 
juniors and seniors can sit by the columns." 

As he walked away I saw that he carried a "paddle" 
in one hand. "Hazing" — a term I had occasionally 
heard in high school — flashed through my mind. I 
had saved the day, not perhaps by the approved method 
of open warfare, but at any rate by perfectly legitimate 
strategy. 

During the remainder of that first week in Missouri 
I found out what it was to be a stranger in a foreign 
land; and as the year wore on I found out more and 
more. Columbia seemed a thousand times farther 
removed from New York than New York had been from 
Vaslui. Back there in the Ghetto everybody had 
thought me quite Americanized. Now I could not 
help seeing that Missouri was more genuinely American 
than the New York I had known; and against this 
native background I appeared greener than when I had 
landed. This new world I had suddenly dropped into 
was utterly without my experience and beyond my 
understanding, so that I could not even make up my 
mind whether I liked or hated it. I had to admire the 
heartiness, the genuineness, and the clean-cut manli- 
ness of it. But, on the other hand, it prided itself on a 
peculiar common sense, a cool-headedness, a practical 
indifference to things of the spirit, which the "intelli- 
gent" of the East Side in me revolted against. 

Nevertheless, I tried very hard to make myself 
agreeable to my fellow-students. But I failed 

206 



IN THE MOLD 

miserably. In the first two months I had, and lost, 
a half-dozen room-mates. Do what I might, I could 
not make them stay with me. There were never any 
hard words; we always parted as "good friends." 
But almost from the first day they would hardly talk 
to me, and before the week was out they would find 
some excuse for moving or asking me to move. I spent 
many sleepless nights trying to figure out the thing. It 
wounded my self-esteem to find my society so offensive 
to everybody. Besides, it touched my poor purse. 
Every time I was left alone in a room I had to pay the 
full rent. But my predicament had its comic side, too. 
It got so that when I found a new room-mate I would 
take a perverse sort of pleasure in watching to see how 
soon he would begin to look the other way when I 
spoke to him. I never had to wait very long. 

These broad intimations, so often repeated, should, I 
suppose, have convinced me that I lacked the stuff of 
which Missourians were made, and should have served 
to drive me back into my shell. Whatever their reasons 
and motives might be, it was quite clear that these 
fellows had no love for my presence; and common 
sense as well as a natural regard for my own sensibilities 
ought to have told me that the simplest way out of my 
scrape was to leave them alone. Besides, I may as well 
confess that this subtle distaste — this deep-lying 
repulsion of contrary temperaments — was by no means 
one-sided. Perhaps I liked my elusive room-mates a 
little better than they liked me. But I possessed 

207 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

enough of self-esteem to tell myself that this was but a 
proof of my own superiority. If Missouri did not take 
to me, I argued, so much the worse for Missouri's 
powers of penetration and appreciation. It betrayed, 
at least, an extremely provincial state of mind. No 
doubt I had my share of damning imperfections, but 
even a college freshman, if he had eyes, could see that 
I was not altogether wanting in the virtues that make 
for grace. And if they should care to ask me, I could 
give these gentlemen a bill of particulars relative to 
their own shortcomings that would take as much of 
their conceit out of them as they avowedly persisted 
in trying to knock out of me. 

All the same I did not leave them alone. I did the 
very opposite. How, in the first place, was 1 to avoid 
them.f^ I was a lonely, deserted rock surrounded and 
buffeted by a vast ocean. Wherever I turned I must 
face them. If I wanted a job, I must work for and with 
them. The class-rooms, the library, the boarding- 
houses, the very streets swarmed and echoed with them. 
I had no choice but to walk with them, talk with them, 
and trade with them. Nay, my case was far worse than 
poor Shylock's: I must even eat with them and — at 
brief intervals — sleep with them. Think of it, an 
entire university, yes, a whole State, stretching over a 
hundred thousand square miles, filled with nothing but 
Missourians! Of course, there was one avenue of 
escape — I might go back to the Ghetto in New York; 
but I was not fool enough for that. Alive as I was from 

208 



IN THE MOLD 

the very start to his deficiencies and his foibles, I could 
see that the Missourian had something to teach me 
that I needed very badly to learn. In one of my 
earliest letters to Esther I wrote: "I am in an appalling 
mess, but it will be the making of me." The sheer 
conflict somehow appealed to me. It was not exactly 
any notion of valor, or any shame at the thought of 
failing to see a thing through. My bringing up had 
bred very little of the chivalrous in me. My friends 
would never dream of holding the failure against my 
character. I merely felt that the constant rubbing of 
shoulders with a body of people who were in nearly 
every way the opposite of myself was bound to do me 
good. Even if I acquired none of the enemy's virtues, 
the contact with him could do nothing less than throw 
light on my own all too numerous weaknesses. 

And so I flung myself into the battle with an intense 
fury. I deliberately went out of my way to get stepped 
on. I attended chapel religiously, in spite of the fact 
that the speeches bored me and the prayers jarred on 
me. I was punctual at meal-time so as not to miss my 
usual portion of sidelong glances and grins and open 
ho-hos. Timid as I was, I let no opportunity slip to 
get into an argument at the cost of getting myself 
thoroughly disliked. I even went so far as to join the 
cadet corps, and was bawled at by the commandant 
(whose thundering bass voice reminded me of Couza), 
and was laughed at by the members of my platoon for 
my unsoldierly bearing, and was eternally posted for 

209 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

soiled gloves or unpolished shoes or errors in executing 
commands, and was made to write excuses (when I 
would rather have read Heine or Huxley) for these 
delinquencies and to rewrite them over and over again 
until they conformed precisely to military etiquette, 
and was haled before the adjutant and bawled at some 
more when I revolted at the stupidity of it all, and was 
punished with extra drilling in the awkward squad — 
every bit of which was just what I deserved for betraying 
my radical faith by getting into the silly business at 
all. More than half the time — if you will pardon the 
unmasculine confession — I was in the depths of the 
blues, and during at least half of that I was contemplat- 
ing suicide, which, however, I took no steps to commit, 
beyond the penning of an exceedingly vivid portrayal 
of the act, which was perpetrated with a vial of deadly 
substances filched from the chemistry laboratory, and 
the subsequent regrets of my fellow-students as they 
reviewed the history of their uncharitable dealings 
with me. 

The worst of it was that all my heroic suffering seemed 
to be going for naught, at least for a long time. For 
the principal problem that I had set out to solve re- 
mained as obstinate as ever. Why would not those 
boys room with me? To this puzzling question none 
of my disagreeable adventures would furnish an answer. 
Of course, it was quite clear they found me a queer, 
unlikable animal. But I had known that all along. 
Why did they not like me.'* None of my guesses satis- 

210 



IN THE MOLD 

fied me. At the boarding-house where I stayed while 
waiting for money from New York I heard a great 
many stories in an impossible dialect about Jews, and 
judging from the satisfaction with which they were 
received I thought at first that I was a victim of ancient 
prejudice. But I could not long hold on to that theory. 
There was not a trace of venom in the yarns. Why, 
these chaps had not the remotest idea what a Jew was 
lil^e! Their picture of him was the stage caricature of 
a rather mild individual with mobile hands who sold 
clothing and spoke broken English, No one in Missouri 
knew that I had had Jewish parents until three years 
later, when, on the occasion of my graduation, the 
newspapers of St. Louis and Kansas City thought my 
career of sujQScient interest to have me interviewed 
and I made some passing allusion to my origin. No 
more tenable was my surmise about class antagonism. 
Indeed, I was not long in Missouri before I was struck 
with the absence of every real class feeling, and I said 
to myself, exultingly, that however America might have 
broken faith wuth me in other ways, her promise of 
democratic equality she had scrupulously fulfilled. To 
be sure, there were the fraternities with their vague 
dream of building up an aristocracy cm a foundation 
of first-rate tailoring and third-rate chorus-girls. But 
they hardly mattered. The genuine American recog- 
nized but one distinction in human society — the vital 
distinction between the strong, effectual, "real" man 
and the soft, pleasure-loving, unreliant failure. As far 

211 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

as I could judge, the "real" men were chiefly "barbs" 
and the failures (at least on examinations) were for the 
most part "hellenes." If, then, my isolation rested 
neither on race prejudice nor on class exclusiveness, 
what did it rest on? My poor, bewildered brain was 
unable to answer. 



xvm 

THE AMERICAN AS HE IS 

MY friend in New York, on whose liberality the 
financial success of my venture was entirely de- 
pendent, had not expected me to get into straits so soon, 
and it was nearly two weeks before help arrived. In the 
mean time I had canvassed the labor-market and had 
found it so discouraging that I informed Esther how 
unjustified her optimism had been. A lot of people 
had taken my name and address, but I could tell from 
the way they looked at me that my chances with them 
would be very slim even if they had not already got 
some one else. The soonest I could possibly expect to 
get employment was at the end of the semester, when a 
number of the present job-holders would be leaving the 
university on various missions. I had, also, caught up 
with my classes, and had succeeded, somehow, in im- 
pressing my teachers a little more favorably than my 
fellow-students. In particular, I was taking effective 
hold of the work in languages, so much so that my 
English instructor had twice read my themes to the 
class without (thank goodness!) divulging my name. 

My seventeen dollars had gone for books, incidentals, 

eis 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

entrance fee, and board; and I was now rapidly and 
ruinously running into debt, and anxiously inquiring 
at the post-oflSce for mail. 

When, at last, relief came in an envelope with yel- 
low stamps, the first thing I did was to buy my permit 
to the University Dining Club and to secure myself 
against the future by paying for a month's keep in 
advance. The price for board, twenty-one meals, was 
one dollar and fifty cents; with the cost of the permit 
it amounted to about two dollars per week. There 
were between fifty and sixty tables in one vast room, 
and eight Missourians at each table. When the big 
gong rang there was a fierce scramble for places, followed 
by a scraping of chairs and a rattling of crockery and 
silverware. Usually during the noon meal the manager 
of the club would get up to make some announcement, 
and invariably he would be greeted by yells of, "Fire 
away," "Jack Horner," "We want butter," "Can the 
oleo." Before an athletic game, and particularly after 
a victory, the rooting and the yelling, the pounding on 
the tables and the miscellaneous racket were deafening. 
I thought I had wandered into a barbarous country. I 
confess I did not altogether disapprove of the bar- 
barians. After a while I tried very hard to be one 
myself. But I did not know how. 

Most of the conversation at the table and around the 
campus was about athletics. I wanted to talk about 
socialism, and found that these university men knew as 
little about it, and had as dark a dread of it, as the 

214 



THE AMERICAN AS HE IS 

clodpate on the East Side. Religion was taboo. 
They went to church because it made them feel good, 
as they put it; and there was an end. They took their 
Christianity as a sort of drug. Sex, too, was excluded 
from sane conversation, although there was no objection 
to it as material for funny stories. I went to one or two 
football and basket-ball games — I could not afford very 
many — and liked them. But I could not, for the life 
of me, say an intelligent word about them. The 
chatter around me about forward passes and goals and 
fumbles might just as well have been in a foreign 
language, for all I got out of it. When Missouri won a 
hard victory over Texas I caught the enthusiasm and 
joined in the shirt-tail parade, wondering, in the mean 
time, what my intellectual friends in New York would 
have thought if they had seen me in that outfit. But 
the hero worship bestowed on the overgrown animals 
who won the battle irritated me. I could not see what 
place this sort of thing had in a university. And it 
surprised and delighted me to find that some of the more 
sensible fellows, who loved the game, took the same 
view of the matter as I did. 

I made heroic efforts to become an adept in sports, 
not so much because the subject interested me, but 
because I did not greatly relish being taken for a fool. 
There could be very little doubt but that my table- 
mates had made up their minds that I was one. No one 
else that they had ever seen or heard of could sit through 
a meal the way I did without opening his mouth, and 

15 215 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

that while the calendar was crowded with "events" of 
every kind. Moreover, I knew but one way to make 
friends with people, and that was by the East Side 
method of discussion. There was no help for it; I was 
in the enemy's country and I must submit to his 
tradition and his customs or die. If he refused to talk 
about poetry and Nietzsche and the Russian revolution 
and the Scandinavian drama and the class struggle, I 
ought, at any rate, to be thankful that there was at least 
one topic he was interested in. It was not his fault 
that I had been sewing sleeves when I ought to have 
been playing ball, and that I had gone to the wrong 
kind of a school for my secondary training, where I had 
been made into a grind and a bore and a disputatious 
fanatic when I could just as well have learned to be a 
level-headed man among men. It was not yet too late, 
fortunately. The opportunities for rounding out my 
education were ample enough. I had but to bring my 
will into play. 

Besides, the institution of sport had begun to interest 
me. No one but an intellectual snob could remain at 
Missouri for any length of time without perceiving that 
the enthusiasm of the ball-field was something more 
than a mere fad or a frivolous pastime. It was a 
highly developed cult, sprung out of the soil and the 
native spirit, and possessed of all the distinguishing 
characteristics of its type. It had a hierarchy and a 
liturgy and a symbolic ritual of its own. What was on 
first impression taken to be but an argot was in reality 

216 



THE AMERICAN AS HE IS 

a very exact sacred tongue, in a class with the choice 
Hebrew which my old rabbi's wife in Vaslui insisted 
on talking on Saturdays. A football match in full 
swing had all the solemnity and all the fervor and color 
of a great religious service. The band and the songs, 
the serpentine processions and the periodic risings, the 
mystic signals and the picturesque vestments, the 
obscure dramatic conflict with its sudden flights and hot 
pursuits, the transfigured faces of the populace, the 
intense silences alternating with violent outbursts of 
approving cheers and despondent groans — all this was 
plainly not a game but a significant national worship, 
something akin to the high mass and the festival of 
Dionysus. 

What had deceived me about the true nature of this 
thing at first was that my Missourian professed devotion 
to an altogether different creed, a creed which was as 
alien to his Western clime as it was hostile to his temper 
and his aspirations. Six days in the week he labored 
at his field sports, and shouted from the house-tops his 
pagan maxim about a sane mind in a sane body, and 
looked upon the world as a fierce battle-ground in which 
every man must grapple with his fellows and in which 
the victor was not only the hero, but the saint as well, 
and resented the merest intimation of any contrary 
doctrine as an insult to human fortitude and a danger 
to civilization, and cultivated a strident, burly, rough 
masculinity, and despised the sensitive and the studious 
and the idealistic as morbid, effeminate, chicken- 

217 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

livered weaklings; and then on the seventh day he 
suddenly turned his coat and changed his tune and 
denied this robust faith of his, and sighed about the 
materialism of the world and the folly of man's desires, 
and assented with bowed head and contrite heart to the 
assertion that the poor (which meant the weak) shall 
inherit the earth, and that men are brothers, and that 
God who feedeth the crow and clotheth the lily shall 
feed and clothe also him, and humbled himself before 
the gentle, impractical dreamer of Nazareth and sang 
hymns to Him and called Him Master, Who could 
under such circumstances fail to arrive at the opinion 
that if the Missourian was not a hypocrite he must at 
least be amazingly inconsistent? 

Athletics, however, was not the only weak link in my 
chain. I was found wanting in the most unexpected 
places. In the class in literature I frequently attracted 
attention by displaying all sorts of scraps of curious 
knowledge, as when the instructor asked for a specimen 
of Hindu drama and I volunteered the play of "Sakun- 
tala," or when, on another occasion, I pointed out that 
the German word genial was in no way related to the 
English word "genial." But when the boys in the 
house organized a 'coon hunt and asked me to join in it 
I had to admit that I did not know what a 'coon was» 
which gave Thompson, the wag of the crowd, an 
opportunity to tell me that 'coons were vegetables, and 
to inquire, in a tone of mock surprise, whether it were 
possible that I had never eaten 'possum and sweet 

218 



THE AMERICAN AS HE IS 

potatoes. In the work in biology and physics the 
things that both teachers and text-books were taking 
for granted as being matters of common knowledge 
were the very ones that puzzled me most. The entire 
lore of field and forest, of gun and workshop, was a 
sealed book to me. I could not drive a nail into a 
plank without hitting my fingers. What were persim- 
mons .^^ How was cider made.'^ Where did the sorghum 
in the pewter pitchers that were always on the tables at 
the club come from,'' I had not the faintest idea. My 
familiarity with trees stopped at the oak; my acquaint- 
ance with flowers at the rose. I did not know how 
to swim or skate or harness a horse or milk a cow. It 
had never entered my head that not all clouds were 
rain-clouds; that a wind from the east brought one 
kind of weather and a south wester another; that gales, 
tornadoes, cyclones, and sand-storms were as dis- 
tinguishable from one another as were hexameters from 
alexandrines and novellas from idyls. There were 
apparently more things in heaven and earth than were 
discussed at Warschauer's Russian tea-house or in the 
works of insurgent literati. Wherefore, I must at 
once revise my opinion of the heathen in Missouri and 
expand my notions as to what constituted a well- 
rounded education. 

My fellow-students, having for the most part come 
to the university direct from the farm, were not slow 
in observing how ignorant I was of all things agricul- 
tural, nor in making the most of their discovery. They 

219 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

found me a godsend for their ready wit and their 
native love of broad farce. They said I did not know 
the difference between a hoe and a threshing-machine; 
but that was an exaggeration. It was true, however, 
that I was not sure whether it was a pig or a sheep that 
bleated, whether clover was a plant and plover a bird, 
or the other way about, whether heifers and colts were 
both or neither of the genus bovine, and whether 
harrow and furrow were interchangeable names for the 
same object or were entirely separate things. I kept 
talking of sowing corn until I was told that "planting" 
was the word. In the Bible and in Shakespeare I had 
always read about the reaping of the grain; in Missouri 
they harvested the crops. I saw no connection between 
this gap in my education and my failure to make 
friends. 

Then it dawned upon me that one reason why I could 
not get on with these fellows was that I did not speak 
their language. Why, I had thought that I was a 
wonder at English. Hadn't I got the highest mark 
in freshman composition .f* Hadn't Doctor Wilbur, of 
the English division, encouraged me to drop medicine 
on the ground that I was cut out for a professorship in 
that subject.^ Yes; but while I pronounced like a 
native and otherwise spoke and wrote with considerable 
freedom, my English was still the very grammatical 
and very clumsy book-English of the foreigner. I was 
weak in the colloquial idiom, and always had to resort 
to roundabout locutions to express the simplest idea. 



THE AMERICAN AS HE IS 

I had mastered the science of EngHsh speech; I had 
yet to acquire the art of it. My vocabulary ran to the 
Latin elements of the hybrid tongue, while what I 
needed worst were the common, every-day words. Of 
course, the professors understood me, and having some- 
how got hold of the outlines of my history, they even 
commended me. But the rank and file of the student 
body pricked up their ears when I talked and simply 
stared. Every time I tried to tell a story it fell flat 
because of some subtle shade of meaning that escaped 
me. My stock of words and phrases was not varied 
enough. I might know one word like "earth," whereas 
the Missourian had his choice of "ground" and "soil" 
and "sod" and half a dozen others which he could draw 
on with a sure hand. 

These little diflSculties in making myself perfectly 
understood had an evil tendency toward making me 
self-conscious and aggravating my timidity. I fell into 
the habit of studying out my sentences before intrusting 
them to the ears of my critical friends, with the conse- 
quence that they turned out more stilted than ever. As 
soon as I opened my mouth I would realize, of course, 
what a bad job I had made of them, and then my 
confidence would fail me, my throat would get parched 
and lumpy, and my interlocutor would cry, "What is 
It?" in such a way as to knock the bottom out of me 
altogether. After a number of experiences of this 
harrowing kind I determined that my voice was in need 
of cultivation and I joined the class in elocution, where 

221 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

the instructor did most of the reading himself — he had 
once been an actor — and lectured interminably on deep 
breathing, and declared with much emphasis that a 
good delivery was essential to vivacious conversation, 
which was what I knew myself, and that it was largely 
a matter of intelligence, which was not true. So that 
I dropped elocution and borrowed a volume of Mark 
Twain from the library and read pages and pages of it 
aloud to myself, as every one at M. S. U. who happened 
to be walking in the neighborhood of Hinkson Creek 
before breakfast can testify. What is more, I bought a 
penny scrap-book and jotted down every word I over- 
heard in my table-mates' conversation that was new to 
my foreign ear, and subsequently consulted the dic- 
tionaries to find out what it meant. 

Unfortunately for me, the men of Missouri had 
command of a whole vast and varied vocabulary of 
which not a trace could be found in any dictionary, no 
matter how diligently I searched. It did not take me 
long to lay hold of their peculiar trick of cutting words 
off at the end, and after a month or so I could myself 
refer to professors as "profs," to a course in literature 
as "lit," and to the quadrangle as the "quad." I 
found that highly practical, like everything else in 
Missouri, and convenient. But when a chap asked me 
to pass him "that stuff," and pointed one day to the 
potatoes and another day to a pile of typewritten notes 
I was mystified. I could not easily perceive what 
quality it was the two commodities had in common that 

222 



THE AMERICAN AS HE IS 

made the same name applicable to both. Moreover, 
I observed that my friends expressed every variety of 
emotion — disappointment, enthusiasm, anger, elation — 
by the one word (or was it two?) "doggone." Food in 
general was called "grub," although gravies and sauces 
were sometimes distinguished as "goo"; while, on the 
other hand, money had a whole chain of names to 
itself; "rocks" and "mazuma" and "wheels" and, of 
course, "stuff." It was all very bewildering. 

Perhaps the greatest stumbling-block in the way of 
my readjustment was the emphasis that my Missourian 
placed on what he called good manners. I was not 
quite so obtuse as to miss the rather frank curiosity 
with which certain details in my conduct at table were 
regarded. Well, I knew better; but it was part of 
my East Side religion not to be concerned with the 
externals of conduct. One was in peril of losing sight 
of the essential and of becoming insincere as soon as 
one began to worry about the correct thing and the 
polite word. Once or twice I succeeded in drawing an 
unwary freshman into an argument about religion or 
economics, and then I wished I had not. His good 
manners rendered him quite sterile as a debater. I 
could on no account get him to make a straightforward, 
flat-footed statement; and he exasperated me by a 
way he had of emasculating my own emphatic assertions 
with his eternal colorless conformity. He invariably 
introduced a remark with an "It seems to me," or an 
"It looks as if," or a "Don't you think?" And if I, 

223 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

with my ill-breeding, shot back at him, as I usually 
did, "No, I don't think so at all; I disagree with you 
entirely," he looked grieved and surprised and visibly 
chilled, and crawfished out of the embarrassing situa- 
tion by admitting that there were two sides to every 
question, and that no doubt I was right, too. And the 
next time he spied me on the street he suddenly de- 
veloped a preference for the opposite side. 

Did he have manners? My father would not have 
thought so. How many whacks over the fingers do 
you suppose I got at the family board at home for 
putting my elbows on the edge of the table, and for 
inclining the soup bowl away from myself while 
dipping the spoon into it backhand .^^ It is painful even 
to recall. Yet that was precisely what they did in 
Missouri. As for using the fingers of the left hand to 
assist the fork in the right in the process of capturing 
an obstinate morsel, whacking, in my parent's opinion, 
was too good for that, and nothing but chasing the 
offender from the table would suffice. Yet that, again, 
was what they did in Missouri. I will say nothing 
about tossing biscuits across the dining-hall and such- 
like violent business, because, in the first place, the good 
name of my college is precious to me, and, secondly, 
because that sort of thing was never the work of any 
but students of engineering or members of the Hannibal 
Club, and these two are not listed as civilized even in 
Missouri. But I will say something of the practice of 
parting with a companion in the street without wishing 

224 



THE AMERICAN AS HE IS 

him good-by, of resting one's legs on the table while 
reading, and of whistling incessantly inside the house; 
and what I will say is this : that what are good manners 
in one country are extremely bad manners in another. 

The business of introductions was my chief abomina- 
tion. In my little radical world in New York the 
institution hardly existed. If you liked a person, you 
went up to him and drew him into a discussion and 
became friends with him. If you did not like him, you 
paid no attention to him. In Missouri this queer formal- 
ity was all over the shop. Everybody wanted to intro- 
duce you to everybody. They seemed to think I would 
take offense if I was not extended the dubious courtesy. 
The ritual of the performance would have been a rich 
source of entertainment to me if I had only had some one 
of my own kind to share it with. My gentleman would 
leap up, grab my hand violently, and, staring me right 
in the eye, exclaim, "Mighty glad to know you, man." 
And he expected me to answer him back in kind. But as 
a rule I was constrained to disappoint him there, because 
I was not at all glad to know him. I was wishing that 
I could meet him on Eldridge Street, where I was at 
home, and see how he would like that. 

I suffered unendurably from hunger. It took me 
three years to get used to American cookery. At the 
club everything tasted flat. I missed the pickles and 
the fragrant soups and the highly seasoned fried things 
and the rich pastries made with sweet cheese that I 
had been brought up on. The breakfast hour was 

225 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

outrageous. In New York I used to drink coffee in 
the morning, and then have breakfast at ten. Here I 
had to get down a full meal at seven o'clock in the 
morning or starve until one. The very order of the 
courses was topsy-turvy. At home we began the big 
meal of the day with radish or ripe olives or chopped 
liver or fish; then we had meat of one kind or another; 
then some vegetables cooked sweet or sour-sweet, and 
wound up with soup. The Missourian always began at 
the tail-end — started with soup (when he had any, 
which was all too rare); then piled his meat and 
potatoes (of potatoes he never tired) and vegetables 
in several heaps all on the same plate, devouring them 
all together; and concluded the performance with a 
muddy paste he called pumpkin pie and some powerful 
beverage that passed for coffee. Is it any wonder that 
I was so slow becoming an American when, as every one 
knows, nationality is principally a matter of diet, and 
it was this array that I must learn to cherish .f^ 



XIX 

THE FRUITS OF SOLITUDE 

MY expense account for 1906-07, which I still 
preserve, along with some choice compositions, a 
note-book or two, and a gratifying press-clipping about 
my maiden speech before the Cosmopolitan Club, as 
the precious mementoes of that incredible year, ought 
not to be allowed to perish in the dark. It should 
certainly prove of inestimable value to certain extrava- 
gant-minded members of the Committee on Student 
Budgets, by showing them what really are the possibili- 
ties of a minimum expenditure for young men in 
"moderate circumstances." They would learn, for 
instance, that the item of amusements and incidentals 
is capable of an amazing contraction from twenty 
dollars to very nearly nothing a year, or to be quite 
accurate, to two dollars and twelve cents, thus: 

Two half -pecks of apples 

Twelve bananas 

One football game 

One basket-ball game 

Two visits to the Nickelodeon 

Smoking tobacco 

One Christmas-dinner cigar 

227 



30 cents 


12 




50 




25 




10 




80 




5 





AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

What a person of more modest tastes than mine could 
do still further to bring this elastic item toward the 
absolute zero is an interesting question. It is clearly 
not indispensable to the maintenance of life to go to 
moving-picture houses; and as long as the club table 
provides enough of bread and gravy, a consistently 
economical young man with a goal before him may 
conceivably eliminate such articles from his diet as 
bananas and apples. 

Still, I admit that I was extravagant at times. Let 
the next item speak for itself. Here are stamps, postal 
cards, and correspondence stationery to the appalling 
amount of seven dollars and six cents! I hope no one 
will think me lacking in a sense of proportion, but the 
truth is that if I did not go oftener to the games and the 
shows it was in order to have more money for letters. 
It was the only way for me to keep my soul alive. I 
wrote to everybody I knew because I loved everybody 
now who was in New York. Sometimes it was business, 
but the greater part of the time it was untainted affec- 
tion. I had to remind brother Harry several times how 
badly I needed those rubber shoes and socks he had 
promised me. Cousin Aby every now and then sent 
me a few of the radical papers, and I must express to 
him the genuine gratitude I felt for being kept in touch 
with the beloved world I had left behind. 

But the bulk of my correspondence was with Esther 
and one or two others of my erstwhile fellow-students 
in the night school. It was to get their letters that I 

228 



THE FRUITS OF SOLITUDE 

regularly raced home to my room between the nine and 
the ten o'clock classes, and whether I was bright or 
stupid the rest of the day depended largely on what the 
mails had brought me from them. Esther was generous 
as to length when she did write, but no amount of urging 
could convince her that a daily letter was not too much. 
Perhaps if she had known how much such things meant 
to me she would have come around. But I did not 
want her to know. I was half-unconsciously putting 
the best face on my life in Missouri. I wanted her to 
follow me. I wanted everybody at the Manhattan 
school to come to Missouri. Was it a selfish craving 
for the society of my own kind.^^ Or was it the pecuhar 
psychology of the whipped dog longing for the sight of 
other whipped dogs? Perhaps. I do not hesitate to 
confess that I had developed a kind of passion for 
wanting to see all my school friends in my own scrape, 
but I think I am honest when I add that I was merely 
hoping that it would do them as much good as it was 
doing me. And so when Esther's resolution seemed to 
be on the breaking-point and she wrote me discouraged 
letters about the terrors of geometry and the heartless- 
ness of examiners I assumed the schoolmasterly tone 
and scolded her for her lack of persistence and held out 
glowing pictures to her of the rewards that were 
awaiting her at the end of her struggles. And I was 
right, too — about Esther, at any rate. For the follow- 
ing autumn I had the satisfaction of seeing her in 
Missouri, where she still remains — as happy an Ameri- 

229 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

can as ever came from Rumania. Of the three or four 
whom I succeeded in bringing out she was the only 
one who stuck it out; the others maintained that they 
could see no fun in the thing. 

No, there was not much fun in being made into an 
American. I was painfully aware of that fact myself. 
Oh, the dreary loneliness of it! Particularly the 
Sundays. Of all the days in the week they were the 
hardest to live through. The very holiday tone in the 
air was suffocating me. Everybody else was busy and 
outrageously happy on Sunday. The boys in the house 
went to church in the morning, wrote letters in the 
afternoon, and went calling in the evening. I was left 
all alone. There was not even any mail. The library — 
the only place where I could still feel a sense of human 
contact — was closed. But there were whole seasons 
that, if anything could, surpassed even those intolera- 
ble Sundays. At Christmas nearly every fellow went 
home to his family, there was an exchange of presents 
and cheerful wishes, invitations were extended to "good 
chaps" to come and partake of turkey and mashed 
potatoes at the homes of their friends; and then for an 
entire fortnight the town looked deserted, and I was 
almost the only boarder left at the club. 

I have an idea, for instance, that I was not par- 
ticularly fond of the jams and the cakes and the 
fudge that a lot of the boys brought home with them 
from their week-end trips to the farm. If I recall 
aright, I had more than one taste of them; for those 

230 



THE FRUITS OF SOLITUDE 

queer fellows were absurdly generous in their own 
surprising way. First they would destroy my appe- 
tite for food by some thoughtless remark and the 
next moment they would ask me to partake of their 
dainties with a "Help yourself" which it was impossible 
to misunderstand. Ah, well, I had eaten better things 
in my day. And yet I envied them their "goodies." 
I often thought that it would be a jolly thing to have a 
mother on a farm somewhere and to have her bake and 
boil things and pack them into one's suit-case while 
one went out into the barn and inquired about the 
health of the newest calf or the old rheumatic dog. 

And I sometimes even had an odd wish that I could 
be a "Christian." What did it matter, after all, that 
they took on faith so many unreasonable things, or 
said they did; and worshiped Jesus as a pale divinity 
while denying His fierce humanity; and coddled them- 
selves into a belief in a second and much longer and 
rather emasculated existence? When one came right 
down to it, it was really immense for a religion — this 
Christianity, with its couples and its Easter bonnets, 
its socials and its watches, its clear-headed emphasis 
on the things of this world, its innocent, child-like 
hoydenism. If I had been born into any one of the 
many indistinguishable varieties of this faith, I often 
asked myself would I have turned against it.^^ Possibly 
not; but all the same I did not often go to church. 

And, of course, I did not go calling at all. Missouri 
is a coeducational university, but it might just as 

I6 231 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

well have been a monastery, for all the social good 
it did me. When my ways and my personality were 
finding so little favor with the men, my chances of 
making friends with the women were, as you may well 
imagine, very scant indeed. Now and then, in the 
course of a recitation, I might get a whispered distress 
call from a young lady whom fate, in the person of the 
professor, had surprised in the midst of other thoughts; 
occasionally in the library, too, such a one might, with 
a gracious smile, ask for assistance in the preparation 
of her English theme. But when she next saw me on 
the street or about the campus she betrayed no sign of 
recognition. Even those who had formally met me at 
the Deutscher Verein and had professed to be pleased 
to make my acquaintance, seemed unaccountably 
eager to sever that acquaintance as soon as the meeting 
was over. Their conduct toward me was a painful 
mystery. It struck me, with my East Side notion of 
frankness, as needlessly insincere. Why, I wondered, 
don't they come out openly and tell me when I displease 
them.f* And I wanted very much to be friends with 
them. Their interests were much finer than the men's, 
and their appreciation of literature was keener. I 
would have given a great deal for the privilege of calling 
on one of a few girls I had observed in class, to take a 
walk with her, and have a discussion in the good old 
style of East Broadway. 

Yes, it was dreary, but it was far from dull. I had 
but to take a glance into myself to find excitement 

1232 



THE FRUITS OF SOLITUDE 

a-plenty. Solitude had its compensations, like every- 
thing else. For one thing I was learning the valuable 
art of enjoying my own company. Back in the Ghetto 
there had come a time once when it was a positive tor- 
ment to remain alone. If there was not a gathering 
somewhere, if no one came to see me, I must at least 
run down into the teeming streets and mingle with the 
throngs and feel the pulse of people about me. If I 
could not see an "intelligent" I might walk into a 
hazin and have a chat with a fellow- Vasluiander. Here 
there was hardly any escape. The presence of the 
crowd was only a stimulant to my wistful thoughts. 
The gay laughter, the companionable groups, the 
beaming couples, only made me feel lonelier than ever. 
In sheer self-defense I tried for a time to delude myself 
with a consolation picture of the Missourian as a cold, 
unsympathetic dog. I pounced on his intense anti- 
social individualism, his worship of the strong man, his 
devotion to the ideal of personal success at all costs, his 
sneering indijBFerence to the unspeakable miseries of the 
black man in his midst, his lack of interest in inter- 
national matters, his snobbish disregard of the claims 
of the worker; and told myself that a fellow who 
walked about the world in that kind of thin shoes could 
hardly be expected to give much sentimental thought 
to the rather minor woes of a moping, hypersensitive 
individual who had chosen to thrust himself his way. 
It was a tremendous relief to think of him in this way, 
as a monstrous device of wood and steel, inasmuch as it 

233 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

did away with the need of further thinking and removed 
the unpleasant business of self-criticism. But the 
picture would not hold its color, and kept gradually 
fading away before the light of facts. Willy-nilly, I 
must admit that there was an openness, a freedom, yes, 
even a delightful warmth and charm — a distinctive 
kind of pioneer neighborliness — in the social atmosphere 
of Missouri which was altogether unique in my ex- 
perience. The very individualism of these people was 
in reality an emphasis on the happiness of the single 
life. They were far from unsympathetic among them- 
selves, and anything but cold even toward the complete 
stranger. When I spent a day at the infirmary the 
whole crowd from the house and the table turned out 
to see me and poked fun at my grippe and (there was 
no escaping it) at myself. They made a religion of 
personal decency. No, it would not do. Unpalatable 
as the truth was, there was no evading the patent fact 
that if I was not taken in among the Missourians the 
fault was with me and not with them. 

With this uncompromising confession came unex- 
pected relief. I was floundering in the dark as you see, 
grappling with my obstinate problem like a miner with- 
out tools and without a lantern. But having made up 
my mind that I was not a victim, but an unconscious 
comedian, it behooved me to stand before the glass and 
enjoy, if I might, my own amusing antics. Once I 
admitted that I really was material for sport, the 
logical thing was to try and see some of it myself, 

234 



THE FRUITS OF SOLITUDE 

perhaps to do something in the way of toning it down 
a bit. And so there followed a pitiless dissecting of the 
internal man, a dragging out into the light of layer upon 
layer of incrusted self, a lining up for inspection of a 
whole vast procession of things — antiques from Syria, 
heirlooms from a long exile in Asia and Europe, shards 
and fragments of a proud and broken ancestry, warped 
bits of thin veneer from Rumania, heavy plate from the 
radical Ghetto, gems and rubbish without end. I took 
in the exhibition with mingled feelings, and asked myself 
incredulously whether all this was what I had been used 
to calling my simple self. The more I contemplated 
it the more I felt inclined to be struck with the oddity 
of it. If that was what my American neighbors had 
in mind when they talked of taking the conceit out of 
me, they were coming very near to accomplishing their 
purpose. Another glance and I would be grinning at 
the pile myself. I was being threatened with a novel 
thing for an East-Sider — a sense of humor. 

Quite as novel, and as a further result of my solitude, 
was the opening of my eyes to the unsuspected miracles 
about me. Both in Rumania and in the Ghetto nature 
was looked upon as either vermin or vegetable, a thing 
to hold your nose at or to devour. As a child I had 
exhibited a fondness for animals; but when my father 
once found me playing with our neighbor's dog he took 
me into the house and made it very clear to me how un- 
Hebraic my conduct had been. Such things, he told 
me earnestly, were of the Gentile, and a good child 

235 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

of our tribe should shun them. On the East Side 
people did frequently take excursions to the neighboring 
parks, but the real attractions were oftener the lecture 
that went with the picnic and the stores of assorted 
food than the loveliness of the landscape. So here 
again was a ragged edge to my training. 

As the dreary months dragged on I took to wandering 
out into the country. At first my chief aim was to run 
away from the house and my own unpleasant thoughts. 
But it was impossible to roam over the pretty hills 
around Columbia for very long without falling under 
their spell. I walked for the most part at night, when 
my lessons for the next day were done, and I found my- 
self becoming enchanted with its myriad mysteries. 
The fragrance of the damp earth, the rustle of the 
wind in the leaves, the murmur of brooks, the scintillat- 
ing fires of innumerable glow-worms, the soothing feel 
of dew-filled cool grass, the sweep of clouds over the 
moon, the far-off voices of beasts and men — all these 
were filtering into my soul and making me into a new 
being. 

My enforced exclusiveness served, also, to advance 
me in my studies. My professor of English has prob- 
ably never found out why I was so prompt with my 
papers, when the majority of the class had to be urged 
and threatened and often penalized to make them 
bring theirs in on time. Well, what else was there for 
me to do when there were no girls to call up and no 
chums to come and drag me away to parties and things.'^ 

236 



THE FRUITS OF SOLITUDE 

Besides, I had for years looked forward to this oppor- 
tunity when time and command of the language might 
adhere to make extensive reading possible. On the 
East Side literature had consisted almost entirely of 
the insurgent moderns, interspersed with a few choice 
English writers like Carlyle, Shelley, and Shakespeare, 
whom we also regarded as "among our own." Now 
with the aid of the courses I was coming upon whole 
continents of undiscovered books, and I threw myself 
with a navigator's zest into the joyous task of explora- 
tion. I was filling note-books with exercises in style 
based on Stevenson and Hazlitt; I was coming back to 
my old enemy Milton and reveling in Paradise Lost; 
and I was devouring the great critics in order to obtain 
guidance for further voyages. Moreover, there was 
German literature — a planet in itself. A class reference 
had directed me to the hundred-and-thirty-odd-volume 
collection of the Deutsche National Literatur, and I 
actually undertook to go through the whole thing from 
beginning to end. 

On the whole, then, it looked as if I might yet 
work out my salvation if only those barbarians would 
leave me to myself. But it was not in them to do that. 
They seemed to be determined on disturbing my peace 
of mind. They were devoting, I honestly believe, all 
their spare thoughts and all their inventive genius to 
thinking up ways of making me uncomfortable. One 
young gentleman, still reminiscent of my ignorance of 
rural things, made up a tale of how I went to get a job 

237 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

on a farm, and proceeded to relate it at the table. 
" The farmer gave Max a pail and a stool and sent him 
out to milk the cow. About an hour later, when the 
old boy failed to show up with the stuff, Reuben went 
out to see what was the trouble. He found his new 
assistant in a fierce pickle. His clothes were torn and 
his hands and face were bleeding horribly. 'What in 
heck is the matter.''' asked the farmer. 'Oh, curse the 
old cow !' said Max, 'I can't make her sit on that stool.' " 
A burst of merriment greeted the climactic ending, al- 
though the yarn was a trifle musty; and the most 
painful part of it was that I must laugh at the silly 
thing myself. 

It was not at all true, as one of my numerous room- 
mates tried to intimate, that I shunned baths. I was 
merely conservative in the matter. One day, however, 
he had the indelicacy to ask me the somewhat personal 
question whether I ever took a bath; and I told him, 
of course rather sullenly, that I did once in a while. 
Some time later I overheard him repeat the dialogue 
to the other men in the house and provoking shouts of 
laughter. It puzzled me to see where the joke was, until 
I learned that these fellows were taking a shower-bath 
at the gymnasium every day. It seemed to me that 
that was running a good thing into the ground. Again, 
I noticed that my room-mates were making a great 
show of their tooth-brushes. They used them after 
every meal and before retiring — as the advertisements 
say — and always with an unnecessary amount of splash 

238 



THE FRUITS OF SOLITUDE 

and clatter. At home I had been taught to keep my 
mouth and teeth clean without all this fuss. Never- 
theless, I thought that I would get a brush and join in 
the drill. After that the other brushes became notice- 
ably quiet. 

And then, of course, there was the institution of the 
practical joke. On April 1st there was soap in the 
pie. If you got in late to a meal, it was wise to brush 
your chair and "pick your bites," if any bites were left. 
If not, there was no telling what you might swallow or 
sit on. More than once I tasted salt in my water and 
pepper in my biscuits. I seemed to have been marked 
from the first as a fit subject for these pranks. 

On Hallowe'en a squad of cadets commanded by a 
corporal entered my room and ordered me to get into 
my uniform, shoulder my gun, and proceed to the 
gymnasium, which, according to the order read, the 
commandant assigned me to guard against stragglers. 
I guarded through a whole uneventful night. Toward 
morning the captain of the football team, who had a 
room in the gymnasium, returned from a party. I 
ordered him to halt and give the password. He 
smiled and tried to enter. I made a lunge for him, 
and would have run my bayonet through him if he had 
not begun to laugh. "Go on home, you poor boy," 
he said. "They pull that stunt off every year. Poor 
joke, I think." The next day my table-mates tried to 
jolly me about it. They said I would be court- 
martialed as a deserter from duty. I got angry, and 

239 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

that made them all the more hilarious. Then a great, 
strapping fellow named Harvey spoke up. *'Be still, 
you galoots," he said to them; and then to me, "For 
gosh sake, fellow, be human!" I tried a long time to 
figure out what he meant by "human," and for the rest 
of my college career I strove hard to follow his advice. 
It was the first real hint I had got on what America, 
through her representatives in Missouri, was expecting 
of me. Harvey became my first American friend. 



XX 



HARVEY 



1WAS still at the stage where one American looked 
and acted exactly as every other, and it was a pro- 
found mystery to me how I had gained the favor of this 
vei-y representative specimen of the type. I had not 
greatly changed, as far as I could judge, between Sep- 
tember and February, unless it was for the worse. If I 
had only had one or two of my own people and had not 
been in such dire need of human fellowship, I doubt 
whether I should have been attracted to him, notwith- 
standing the fact that I owed him a debt of gratitude 
for having taken up the cudgels in my behalf. But he 
was a long way from being hard up for company. I 
walked home with him from the club that night, and I 
observed, with a feeling mingled of envy and admi- 
ration, that he was cordially greeted by almost every 
one that passed us, and during the half-hour that I 
remained in his room he must have had a dozen friends 
dropping in, who were as amazed to find him hob- 
nobbing with me as I was myself. 

My surprise at his unaccountable behavior toward 
me reached a climax when, a few days later, he asked me 

241 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

to come and live with him. "Captain," he said, "you 
and I are pretty much in the same boat. If you want 
an old lady let's get together." I could scarcely believe 
my ears. What could he be up to.?^ I wondered as soon 
as my first flush of joy at his offer had passed. Some 
new variety of practical joke that I had not yet ex- 
perienced? Or was it really possible that I was 
"arriving" in Missouri.'' Be his scheme what it might, 
I felt a great temptation to accept. But, remembering 
my long record of failures as a room-mate, I hesitated 
lest my new-found friendship (if it was friendship) 
should go on the rocks. "I should like to," I said, 
"but I think I had better not." 

Then Harvey told me some things about himself 
that opened my eyes and reassured me. I had thought 
that I was the only one at Missouri who did not know 
where his next week's board was coming from, and that 
every one else belonged, as they had warned me in the 
Ghetto, among the capitalists. But this fellow, who 
was in his own country, it turned out, was, if any- 
thing, poorer than I. He, too, had come to college from 
the ranks of the worker. He was toiling nights and 
vacations, and paying ten per cent, compound interest 
on periodic borrowings, to get an education which he, 
like myself, had been struggling for years to attain. 
That was what he had in mind when he said that we 
were in the same boat. In addition, we had various 
and sundry interests in common. As far as my observa- 
tion could determine, he was the only freshman I had 

£42 



HARVEY 

run into who cared anything about reading as a recrea- 
tion. He was intending ultimately to go into engineer- 
ing, but he was taking courses in the languages — a rare 
procedure in Missouri. "Cultural value" — a phrase I 
had not often heard in the past five months — kept 
continually recurring in his remarks about studies. 
And, best of all, he confessed to a weakness for argument 
about religion and other matters which was as convinc- 
ing as it was irresistible. 

From the first our relations were those between 
master and disciple. Much as I had longed all these 
weary months for some one who could understand me, 
it was not Harvey's intellectual and liberal leanings 
that I prized in him most. In September it might 
have been different. But now I had definitely settled 
down to the role of a captive in a foreign land; I had 
almost learned to endure the personal inconveniences 
of my situation; and I was determined that I must 
bring away something in the nature of a system of 
Missouri philosophy for the edification of the people 
at home when the time came and I regained my liberty. 
Harvey was the man to help me compass this purpose. 
For all his unexpected divergencies from the rank and 
file, I could not help regarding him as a kind of epitome 
of the national character. He knew the speech and 
the customs, the heart and the soul, of the native. 
Between him and his friends I should have no difficulty 
in piecing out a life-size portrait of the creature. 

The differences began to crop up between us right 

243 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

away. Out of the countless discussions with which 
we beguiled the Sunday evenings (Harvey did not go 
"calling"), one inescapable conclusion emerged — that 
whatever was sacred to me was anathema to him and 
that everything that he accepted as unquestioned truth 
was, to say the best for it, a string of dubious common- 
places to me. He had, for instance, worked all his 
adult life with his hands, but he distrusted the organiza- 
tions and the hopes of the laboring-man. He was a 
churchman, and he looked now to the parson and then 
to the successful business man to regenerate the earth, 
if, indeed, this perfect earth needed regenerating. 
There was something positively religious in his worship 
of success in the abstract. Given success, he seemed to 
feel, and all the other virtues in the book must follow 
as a matter of course. The man who had risen to the 
top could not but be good and clean and sane and self- 
controlled and clear-sighted as to the true values of 
life. He was not only the strong man, but the bene- 
factor of the race as well. In some mysterious manner 
he was fulfilling the divine purpose while pursuing his 
own interests. The reason why America was great 
was because she had the wisdom to give free rein to the 
ambitions of the individual. The country had been 
made by its big men. 

To me all this was not only far-fetched, it was 
contradictory from Harvey's own point of view. For 
my good friend's conduct belied his philosophy; and, 
what is more, in his better moments he openly pro- 

244 



HARVEY 

fessed devotion to a set of principles which were the 
direct opposite of the thirty-nine articles of success. 
These, I thought, he lived up to with a rigidity born 
of natural instinct and conviction. He abhorred im- 
modesty, self-advertising, aggressiveness, show, the 
cold insistence on literal justness — in short, the major 
qualities by which commercial success is made possible. 
I was constantly learning from him the excellent habit 
of giving in when I was right, of declining the things that 
were my due, of minimizing instead of exaggerating 
my own virtues and little superiorities. When Harvey 
got some new clothes and I praised them he blushed 
(the burly giant) and waved me aside with a deprecating 
hand. If I said of a theme of his, " That is a neat piece 
of work, colonel," he said, "Get out, you don't call 
that English." 

Once we bought a peck of apples in partnership for 
thirty-five cents. I hesitated a moment whether to 
give him seventeen or eighteen cents as my share of 
the outlay, and then generously decided to make it 
eighteen. Harvey tossed the pennies back and said, 
"We'll call it square, old gas-pipe." When I suggested 
dividing up the fruit he gave me a queer glance and then 
took a few handfuls and left me nearly two-thirds of 
the peck. I had thought he would count them and 
pick out the biggest ones. I was using his shoe-blacking 
and my East Side sense of strict dealing told me that 
I ought to pay for it. But when I offered Harvey a 
nickel he refused it, and when I insisted on his taking 

245 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

it lie simply told me that I might buy the next can. 
The idea had never occurred to me. 

But he was not consistent even in his magnanimity. 
There seemed to be a shadow line somewhere in his 
system where self-denial ended and self-assertion began, 
or, as he expressed it once, where a fellow must stop 
giving in because the other side was doing the taking 
in. I do not know whether he still remembers, but I 
certainly have not forgotten the incident of the fountain- 
pen. I must say that it was not I who had asked 
Harvey to let me use it. But he must have observed 
that I had none and that I was having a struggle with 
an old-fashioned wooden penholder I had brought from 
New York, and so one night he suggested that I might 
see what I could do with his fountain-pen. "May I.^" 
I asked. "Sure. Go ahead. Help yourself , any time," 
he said. I used it three or four times, and then I noticed 
that the thing had disappeared from the table. Why.^* 
Clearly I had abused the privilege. But he had said 
"any time," hadn't he.'* Now in the Ghetto no one 
would have granted any such unlimited rights to private 
property, but once one had committed himself he would 
have stuck it out to the end. In Missouri the rule 
seemed to be that you can have anything as long as you 
don't ask for it, and that as soon as you have accepted 
a liberal offer too literally you have really forfeited your 
privileges! 

Not more than three days after this subtle lesson I 
engaged a laundress to call for my clothes. By the 

246 



HARVEY 

time she appeared for my first batch I had come upon 
another woman who charged more reasonably and had 
given the work to her. Harvey was in the room when 
the original woman showed up, and I could see that he 
was listening with disapproval to what I was telling 
her. As soon as she was gone he opened fire on me. 
"Confound you," he said, "why did you do that?" 
"Well," I answered, "I changed my mind. Haven't I 
a right to do that.^^" "Yes," he retorted, "but you 
could have let her know." I was about to answer him 
that he might practise what he preached, but it occurred 
to me that perhaps the American logic made a distinc- 
tion between room-mates and laundresses and between 
fountain-pens and soiled linen, and I said nothing. 

My confusion was increasing from day to day, and 
largely because Harvey and his friends worshiped 
simultaneously at two distinct and opposed shrines. 

Harvey had a discerning ear for music and played 
the fiddle with considerable skill. I envied him the 
accomplishment both because it enabled him to earn 
money more easily than I did and because he got no 
end of fun out of it. And yet it was a curious thing 
that my friend was — I do not know what else to call it — 
ashamed of his talent. When we were alone he fondled 
his instrument as a loving mother fondles a child, and 
played everything from college songs to nocturnes, 
and studied little booklets on the art of bowing and what 
not. But as soon as his Missouri friends came in to 
see him he either put the beloved thing into its case and 
17 247 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

hid it in the closet, or, if he was caught red-handed, he 
took on a sheepish air and spoke condescendingly of it 
as a frivolous diversion, and struck up "Turkey in the 
Straw" or "The Arkansas Traveler." Why? I made 
bold to ask him once, and his answer was more absurd 
than his conduct. He said, "It is thought a bit 
effeminate for a man to care for music." I could not 
forbear a glance at him as he said it; and the incongruity 
of this six-footer with his huge hands and powerful 
frame worrying his head lest he should not be thought 
masculine enough made me laugh in his face. 

But Harvey knew his people better than I did. That 
wholesome manliness which I had so sincerely admired 
on arriving at Columbia had a worm at its root. It 
was the fashion, you see, to be masculine in Missouri, 
and when a thing becomes fashionable it ceases to be 
genuine. Those whom nature had endowed with the 
virtue made a fetish and a self-conscious pose of it, 
and those who lacked it became obsessed with the 
desire to imitate it. The final insult to a Missourian 
was to suggest that he was "sissified." There was 
something like a panic among the more refined of my 
fellow-students at the mere mention of effeminacy. 
Even the girls dreaded it. They, too, affected a kind 
of factitious burliness, a worship of the strident male, 
a hail-fellow-well-met air. They liked to greet one 
another with the jolly halloo, and the slap on the back, 
and betrayed an odd fondness for the big sweater and 
the heavy boot and the words "fellow" and "bully." 

248 



HARVEY 

The mania was having its effect on the course of study 
and the whole Kfe of the university. The departments 
of the arts were thrown on the defensive. The professor 
must adopt an apologetic tone for being interested in 
such unmanly things as poetry, music, or painting. 
Sentiment being tabooed as effeminate, it followed 
inevitably that whatever in the curriculum addressed 
itself to the emotions must be avoided like a plague. 

In speaking of his friends Harvey constantly alluded 
to "broads" and "narrows." There was Lowry, who 
never failed to remind us that the particular sect to 
which he belonged was the only true Christian body 
because its bishops had been the recipients of the 
apostolic touch from the beginning of the world. Lowry 
was narrow, it appeared. On the other hand, Higgins 
and Moore were broad, and Harvey advised me to 
cultivate their acquaintance. I tackled first one and 
then the other, and found that they were not averse 
to discussion even about religion. But as soon as I 
betrayed myself by questioning the validity of the more 
fundamental doctrines of theology they informed me 
that certain things had better not be touched. " Broad- 
ness" seemed to consist in being tolerant toward 
Presbyterians if you were a Methodist, or toward 
Baptists if you were a Congregationalist. 

Some of those boys, on the other hand, presented a 
problem of another kind that baflfled me for a long time. 
When I solved it I had taken one more step toward 
becoming an American. It was true that / mowed 

249 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

lawns, and washed dishes, and waited on tables, and 
did a score of other odd jobs to make ends meet; but, 
then, I was an immigrant without parents and without 
resources. If I had the means, I thought, I would 
rather not engage in all these extra-mural activities, 
and devote all my time to study and recreation. But 
among the other dish-washers at the club I learned there 
were young men whose fathers had large farms or big 
businesses in the little towns. Why, I wondered, did 
they not support their sons through college decently? 
Then I made the interesting discovery that they did 
not want to be supported; that not to be supported 
was their idea of going through college decently. I 
revolved that idea through my head until I got it. 
It showed me the Missourian in a new light. I 
could almost forgive him his indifference to radical 
discussions. 

If I was by degrees being turned into an American 
my friend and room-mate was learning a few things 
about the Ghetto and finding them not half so repulsive 
as he had thought. On several occasions Harvey lis- 
tened with interest to excerpts from Yiddish literature 
which I translated for him from periodicals and pam- 
phlets I had brought with me. Now and then my 
brother Paul sent me a few choice morsels from home — 
Rumanian pastrama, or cheese, or ripe olives, and it was 
gratifying to observe that Harvey smacked his lips 
after sampling them. Toward the end of the winter 
we had definitely formed the habit of having midnight 

250 



HARVEY 

spreads, which never came at midnight, because Harvey 
was subject to a peculiar failing of getting hungry by 
nine o'clock, which he justified by declaring that it 
required more fuel to run a big engine than a small 
one. I also taught him to drink tea made and served 
in the Russian way. Harvey supplied the alcohol- 
burner and the pot and I furnished the tea; and every 
night, just when I thought he was in the thick of his 
mathematics or German, he would suddenly look up 
and give me a significant wink. Then I would look 
blank and he would smile encouragingly and enlighten 
me further by the monosyllable "feast." If I still 
failed to rise to his enthusiasm, he would say " Shall we? " 
and before I could answer he would make a dash for the 
corner of the room called the kitchen, and spread a 
newspaper at one end of the table, and announce in a 
falsetto voice that supper was served. 

On Saturday afternoons, if there was no play in town 
that week, and Harvey did not have to go to orchestra 
rehearsals, we would go out on the back lot with a ball 
and a glove and I would revive an art I had not prac- 
tised since childhood. But the ball was much harder 
than the kind I had known in Vaslui, and my hands 
would get black and blue after an hour's catching, and 
Harvey would laugh every time I let a "hot one" pass 
without making an effort to stop it, and tell me that the 
essential thing in becoming an American was to get 
toughened up. When the baseball season opened he 
took me with him to one of the games, and explained its 

251 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

mysteries to me, and spoke enthusiastically of its science 
and said that it was the only real national sport. At 
which I had to smile, because it was the very game we 
used to play at home — only we called it "oina" — with a 
ball made of rags and pieces of board torn out of fences 
for bats. And as I looked around me and saw dignified 
professors and rheumy-eyed Civil War veterans tossing 
their hats in the air, I wished that my father could be 
present so that I might convince him of the profound 
truth I had failed as a boy to get through his head, that 
an "oina" was a joy forever and not the silly childish 
thing that he insisted it was. 

Gradually, too, Harvey was getting acquainted with 
my past history and, much to my amazement, approv- 
ing of it. Once when I begged him not to let the 
details of my career go any farther he looked at me in 
astonishment and called me a fool. "You deserve all 
the credit in the world, you bloomin' idiot," he added. 
Evidently he regarded my sweat-shop experiences in 
the light of heroic deeds. And thereafter he made it a 
point to let every one of his friends know just the kind 
of marvel his queer room-mate was, and they also — 
"narrows" and "broads" alike — appeared to think the 
better of me for my humble past and to show more 
cordiality toward me when they passed me on the street. 
"Odd, isn't it?" I kept thinking. Intellectually I 
would probably have felt more at home in a European 
university. But supposing even that any one could 
have leaped from the sweat-shop to college over there, 

252 



HARVEY 

would his fellow-students have forgiven him his origin, 
to say nothing of praising him for it? 

What Harvey could not forgive me, and what came 
very near to wrecking our friendship, was what he 
termed my "contemptible habit" of smoking ciga- 
rettes. At first I thought that the odor of tobacco was 
offensive to him, and put myself to the inconvenience 
of going out of the house whenever I felt the desire for 
a smoke. But my pains seemed to go for naught; our 
relations remained as strained as ever. "What is the 
objection?" I finally asked him. "Oh, nothing," he 
answered, "if you can't see for yourself how picayune 
and insignificant the pesky things make you look." 
More masculinity, I reflected, and asked some one in 
New York to send me a pipe, adding that cigarettes were 
not in fashion in Missouri. Then I found that I had 
hit upon another snag in the American character, for 
Harvey apparently relished my pipe even less than he 
did the cigarettes. Surely, I asked myself, a pipe was 
not effeminate? No, indeed. But the whole business 
of smoking revealed a deplorable moral degeneracy. It 
was one of the habits that break as opposed to the habits 
that make, as one of those curious composite doctor- 
preachers who kept constantly resorting to the uni- 
versity and talking to men only neatly expressed it. 
Not exactly masculinity, then, but success. 

My experiences with Harvey and with Americans 
generally have bred in me the conviction that no one 
should be granted citizen's papers unless he can "see" 

253 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

a joke. A man has not even begun the process of 
readjustment as long as he still stares blankly at the 
sallies of native humor; and it goes without saying that 
the simplest as well as the most conclusive test as to 
whether a foreigner has acquired anything like a 
respectable command of English lies along the line of 
the "story." You may read and enjoy Shakespeare or 
Emerson; you may write a first-rate business letter in 
English; you may be an enrolled Republican or 
Democrat; but all this avails you nothing, and in your 
heart of hearts you are a hopeless alien. Even an 
interest in outdoor sports is no convincing proof that 
you are naturalized. It may be faked. Do you go 
wild over Bill Nye's History of the United States? Do 
you laugh till the tears run down your face at Mark 
Twain's description of a Turkish bath.^* Do you turn 
to the next to the last column on the editorial page of 
the evening paper and devour that before you even think 
of the sporting page, let alone the news? Above all, 
can you do your share at the dinner-table or at the 
marshmallow party when conversation becomes feeble 
and some one proposes " stories ".f* Then you are an 
American to the bone, I don't care how much you may 
believe in the divine right of kings and in secret diplo- 
macy. In America — or at least in Missouri — every one 
is a wit, or tries to be. No one says, simply, "Pass me 
the salt." What he says is, "May I crave the saline 
or the NaCl?" just as no one asks you where you live, 
but where is your habitat or domicile. An American 

254 



HARVEY 

will not talk or write a personal letter unless he can be 
funny. It is an excellent national trait. It makes 
conversation breezy. But I think it often makes it 
scarce. 

I owe it to Harvey (who did not have to try to be a 
wag) that I made this jolly American characteristic, 
among many others, in part my own. Indeed, any 
inventory of my first year at college will reveal an 
astonishing list of things over and above what I had 
started out to get. The university catalogue omits 
quite as much as it includes. It makes absolutely no 
mention of the unofficial extension courses under 
Professor Harvey, of the practical joke as an educa- 
tional method, and of the special department of personal 
relations for the benefit of foreign students. The 
peasant in Rumania says very truly that one never 
knows what kind of bargain he is going to make until 
he gets to market. I had gone to Missouri to become a 
doctor. But Joe Shapiro was a real prophet. Those 
capitalists and oppressors were making me into a 
gentleman. 



XXI 

THE ROMANCE OF READJUSTMENT 

AS the summer drew near I began to look around for 
Jr\. something to do. I would spend nearly one 
hundred and twenty-five dollars, I saw, between 
September and June, and half of it borrowed money. 
Harry, from whom I had got almost no help the first 
year, had just married and gone into business for 
himself, and he was giving me to understand in very 
broad hints that I need not rely on him the next year. 
Brother Paul had been out of work for the better part 
of the winter, and was trying desperately to keep alive 
while paying off some of the debts he had made in his 
period of unemployment. My friend, who had more 
than lived up to his promises, had, to be sure, agreed 
to lend me fifty dollars every year, but I was endeavor- 
ing to bring him out to Missouri, and if I succeeded he 
would need all he had to pay his own way. Therefore, 
if I meant to return to school next year I must find a 
way to earn enough to give me at least a good start in 
the fall. I discussed the question with Harvey and he 
made several suggestions. He himself was going to 
Joplin, where there was a lot of building and where he, 

856 



THE ROMANCE OF READJUSTMENT 

being a carpenter, always found plenty to do. I 
might come along with him, and try my luck in the zinc- 
mines. Or, there were the Kansas wheat-fields, where 
they paid two-fifty a day and keep. A number of 
students were going there summer after summer, and 
returning with their hides well tanned and their pockets 
well lined. Still, on second thought, he would not 
advise me to tackle harvesting. I might not be able 
to stand it, with my soft hands and my town breeding. 

But I gave very little thought to his advice. I was 
longing for a sight of New York. It would cost fifty 
dollars to go there and back, but I tried to persuade 
myself that I would earn enough more in the city to 
make it worth while. If the worst came to the worst, 
I could always get a job at the machine. I was known 
there. I had friends and old pupils. Tutoring was a 
possibility, particularly with my added prestige as a 
college man. There was no limit to the things that one 
could do in a large town. And deep down in my foolish 
heart I knew quite well that all these calculations were 
but a sham. In the letter I wrote to Esther I honestly 
confessed that if I remained away from my own people 
that summer I would feel like a man who was forced to 
work seven days in the week and would be unfit to 
resume work in the fall. 

Then Paul somehow divined my thoughts and sur- 
prised me one fine June morning with a money order for 
thirty dollars and a letter saying that he would not 
forgive me if I did not come and spend the vacations 

257 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

at home. Heaven alone knows where he got it, but 
there it was; and I sent him back a post-card with the 
picture of a saddled donkey and the words "Ready to 
Pack" underneath. The examinations had just been 
held, and I delayed only a few days until the instructors 
returned my note-books and told me my marks. 
Harvey was hanging over till after Commencement, 
because the closing days of the session were crowded 
with dances and entertainments and he was cleaning up 
a lot of money with the orchestra. He had an amused 
twinkle in his eye as he watched me excitedly getting 
ready, and every now and then he would ask: "Well, 
old fish, do you think we'll see you back with us next 
year? Or do you think you've had enough of the wild 
and woolly West?" And when I told him with great 
emphasis that nothing in the world should keep me 
away from Missouri until I had finished the course he 
slapped me on the back and cried: "Now you're talking. 
We'll make a man of you yet." Then he would add, 
"But, say, if those anarchists get a hold of you and 
keep you there, let a fellow know what's happening to 
you. Maybe we can come to the rescue." 

So to New York I went, and lived through the last 
and the bitterest episode in the romance of readjustment. 
During that whole strenuous year, while I was fighting 
my battle for America, I had never for a moment 
stopped to figure the price it was costing me. I had 
not dreamed that my mere going to Missouri had 
opened up a gulf between me and the world I had come 

258 



THE ROMANCE OF READJUSTMENT 

from, and that every step I was taking toward my 
ultimate goal was a stride away from everything that 
had once been mine, that had once been myself. Now, 
no sooner had I alighted from the train than it came 
upon me with a pang that that one year out there had 
loosened ties that I had imagined were eternal. 

There was Paul faithfully at the ferry, and as I came 
off he rushed up to me and threw his arms around me 
and kissed me affectionately. Did I kiss him back? 
I am afraid not. He took the grip out of my hand and 
carried it to the Brooklyn Bridge. Then we boarded 
a car. I asked him where we were going, and he said, 
mysteriously, "To Harry's." A surprise was awaiting 
me, apparently. As we entered the little alley of a store 
in the Italian quarter I looked about me and saw no 
one. But suddenly there was a burst of laughter from 
a dozen voices, a door or two opened violently, and my 
whole family was upon me — brothers, a new sister-in- 
law, cousins of various degrees, some old people, a few 
children. They rushed me into the apartment behind 
the store, pelting me with endearments and with ques- 
tions. The table was set as for a Purim feast. There 
was an odor of pot-roasted chicken, and my eye caught 
a glimpse of chopped eggplant. As the meal progressed 
my heart was touched by their loving thoughtfulness. 
Nothing had been omitted — not even the red wine and 
the Turkish peas and rice. Harry and every one else 
kept on urging me to eat. "It's a long time since you 
have had a real meal," said my sister-in-law. How true 

259 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

it was! But I felt constrained, and ate very little. 
Here were the people and the things I had so longed to 
be with; but I caught myself regarding them with the 
eyes of a Western American. Suddenly — at one glance, 
as it were — I grasped the answer to the problem that 
had puzzled me so long; for here in the persons of those 
dear to me I was seeing myself as those others had 
seen me. 

I went about revisiting old scenes and found that 
everything had changed in my brief absence. My 
friends were not the same; the East Side was not the 
same. They never would be the same. What had 
come over them.^^ My kinsfolk and my old companions 
looked me over and declared that it was I who had 
become transformed. I had become soberer. I carried 
myself differently. There was an unfamiliar reserve, 
something mingled of coldness and melancholy, in my 
eye. My very speech had a new intonation. It was 
more incisive, but less fluent, less cordial, they thought. 
Perhaps so. At any rate, while my people were still 
dear to me, and always would be dear to me, the 
atmosphere about them repelled me. If it was I who 
had changed, then, as I took in the little world I had 
emerged from, I could not help telling myself that the 
change was a salutary one. 

While calling at the old basement bookshop on 
East Broadway I suddenly heard a horrible wailing 
and lamenting on the street. A funeral procession was 
hurrying by, followed by several women in an open 

260 



THE ROMANCE OF READJUSTMENT 

carriage. Their hair was flying, their faces were red 
with weeping, their bodies were swaying grotesquely tq 
the rhythm of their violent cries. The oldest in the 
group continued mechanically to address the body in 
the hearse: "Husband dear, upon whom have you left 
us? Upon whom, husband dear.?" A young girl 
facing her in the vehicle looked about in a terrified 
manner, seized every now and then the hand of her 
afflicted mother, and tried to quiet her. The frightful 
scene, with its tragic display, its abysmal ludicrousness, 
its barbarous noise, revolted me. I had seen the like 
of it before, but that was in another life. I had once 
been part of such a performance myself, and the grief 
of it still lingered somewhere in my motley soul. But 
now I could only think of the affecting simplicity, the 
quiet, unobtrusive solemnity of a burial I had witnessed 
the previous spring in the West. 

The afternoon following my arrival I flew up-town 
to see Esther. She waved to me and smiled as I 
approached — she had been waiting on the "stoop." 
As she shook my hand in her somewhat masculine 
fashion she took me in with a glance, and the first thing 
she said was, "What a genteel person you have become! 
You have changed astonishingly." "Do you think so?" 
I asked her. " I am afraid I haven't. At least they do 
not think so in Missouri." Then she told me that she 
had got only ten points, but that she was expecting 
three more in the fall. She was almost resigned to 
wait another year before entering college. That would 

2Q1 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

enable her to make her total requirements, save up a 
little more money, and get her breath. "A woman is 
not a man, you know," she added. "I am beginning 
to feel the effects of it all. I am really exhausted. 
Geometry has nearly finished me. And mother has 
added her share. She is no longer young, and this 
winter she was ill. I have worried and I have had to 
send money. But let us not talk about my troubles. 
You are full of things to tell me, I know." 

Yes, I had lots I wanted to say, but I did not know 
where to begin ; and the one thing that was uppermost 
in my mind I was afraid to utter lest she should mis- 
understand and feel injured and reproach me. I did 
not want her to reproach me on first meeting. I 
wanted to give myself time as well as her. And so we 
fell into one of those customary long silences, and for a 
while I felt at home again, and reflected that perhaps 
I had been hasty in letting the first poignant reactions 
mislead me. Toward evening Esther remarked that it 
was fortunate I had got to town the day before. If I 
had no other plans, she would take me to a meeting at 
Clinton Hall where Michailoff was to speak on "The 
coming storm in America." It would be exciting, she 
said, and enlightening. Michailoff had just come out 
of prison. He was full of new impressions of America 
and "the system" generally, and one could rely on him 
to tear things open. 

Of course, we went, and the assemblage was noisy 
and quarrelsome and intolerant, and the hall was stuffy 

26SB 



THE ROMANCE OF READJUSTMENT 

and smelly, and the speaker was honest and fiery and 
ill-informed. He thundered passionately, and as if he 
were detailing a personal grievance, against American 
individualism and the benighted Americans who al- 
lowed a medieval religion and an oppressive capitalis- 
tic system to mulct and exploit them, and referred to a 
recent article in the Zukunft where the writer had 
weakly admitted the need of being fair even to Chris- 
tianity, and insisted that to be fair to an enemy of 
humanity was to be a traitor to humanity. I listened 
to it all with an alien ear. Soon I caught myself 
defending the enemy out there. What did these folk 
know of Americans, anyhow? Michailoff was, after 
all, to radicalism what Higgins and Moore were to 
Christianity. His idea of being liberal was to tolerate 
anarchism if you were a socialist and communism if you 
were an individualist. And as we left the hall I told 
Esther what I had hesitated to tell her earlier in the 
evening. 

"Save yourself, my dear friend. Run as fast as you 
can. You will find a bigger and a freer world than 
this. Promise me that you will follow me to the West 
this fall. You will thank me for it. Those big, 
genuine people out in Missouri are the salt of the earth. 
Whatever they may think about the problem of uni- 
versal brotherhood, they have already solved it for 
their next-door neighbors. There is no need of the 
social revolution in Missouri; they have a generous 
slice of the kingdom of heaven." 

263 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

Maybe I was exaggerating, but that was how I felt. 
From this distance and from these surroundings 
Missouri and the new world she meant to me was 
enchanting and heroic. The loneliness I had endured, 
the snubbing, the ridicule, the inner struggles — all the 
dreariness and the sadness of my life in exile — had 
faded out of the picture, and what remained was only 
an idealized vision of the clean manhood, the large 
human dignity, the wholesome, bracing atmosphere of 
it, which contrasted so strikingly with the things 
around me. 

No, there was no sense in deceiving myself, the East 
Side had somehow ceased to be my world. I had 
thought a few days ago that I was going home. I had 
yelled to Harvey from the train as it was pulling out of 
the station at Columbia, "I am going home, old man!" 
But I had merely come to another strange land. In the 
fall I would return to that other exile. I was, indeed, a 
man without a country. 

During that entire summer, while I opened gates on 
an Elevated train in Brooklyn, I tussled with my 
problem. It was quite apparent to me from the first 
what its solution must be. I knew that now there was 
no going back for me; that my only hope lay in con- 
tinuing in the direction I had taken, however painful 
it may be to my loved ones and to myself. But for a 
long time I could not admit it to myself. A host of 
voices and sights and memories had awakened within 
me that clutched me to my people and to my past. 

£61 



THE ROMANCE OF READJUSTMENT 

As long as I remained in New York I kept up the 
tragic farce of making Sunday calls on brother Harry 
and pretending that all was as before, that America 
and education had changed nothing, that I was still one 
of them. I had taken a room in a remote quarter of 
Brooklyn, where there were few immigrants, under the 
pretense that it was nearer to the railway barns. But I 
was deceiving no one but myself. Most of my relatives, 
who had received me so heartily when I arrived, seemed 
to be avoiding Harry's house on Sundays, and on those 
rare occasions when I ran into one of them he seemed 
frigid and ill-at-ease. Once Paul said to me: "You are 
very funny. It looks as if you were ashamed of the 
family. You aren't really, are you? You know they 
said you would be when you went away. There is a 
lot of foolish talk about it. Everybody speaks of Harry 
and me as the doctor's brothers. Can't you warm 
up?" 

I poured out my heart in a letter to Harvey. If a 
year ago I had been told that I would be laying my 
sorrows and my disappointments in my own kindred 
before any one out there, I would have laughed at the 
idea. But that barbarian in Missouri was the only 
human being, strangely enough, in whom I could now 
confide with any hope of being understood. I tried to 
convey to him some idea of the agonizing moral ex- 
perience I was going through. I told him that I was 
aching to get back to Columbia (how apt the name was !) 
to take up again where I had left off the process of my 

265 



AN AMERICAN IN THE MAKING 

transformation, and to get through with it as soon as 
might be. 

And in the fall I went back — this time a week before 
college opened — and was met by Harvey at the station, 
just as those rural-looking boys had been met by their 
friends the year before. When I reached the campus 
I was surprised to see how many people knew me. 
Scores of them came up and slapped me on the back and 
shook hands in their hearty, boisterous fashion, and 
hoped that I had had a jolly summer. I was asked to 
join boarding-clubs, to become a member in debating 
societies, to come and see this fellow or that in his 
room. It took me ofiF my feet, this sudden geniality 
of my fellows toward me. I had not been aware how, 
throughout the previous year, the barriers between us 
had been gradually and steadily breaking down. It 
came upon me all at once. I felt my heart going out 
to my new friends. I had become one of them. I 
was not a man without a country. I was an American. 



THE END 



